By Diccon Towns, CEO of ALSO Festival
It will come as no surprise to read that UK festivals are having a hard time at the moment. This recent article in the Guardian lists yet more organisers who have been forced to heave their gates shut, adding to the ever growing list started in the pandemic. Nozstock, Cornbury, The Good Life, One Love have all gone for good. Standon Calling and Bluedot have taken a year out to consider their options, others like Wilderness and Kite Festival are still to announce their line up, adding to uncertainty in the sector.
In some ways, the reasons are obvious: An over-saturated market is hit by a pandemic that obliterates your income for a year or more. Rampant inflation has increased your running costs by 30 to 40%, costs you can’t pass onto your customers because, guess what, there’s a cost of living crisis that has decimated their disposable income too, and some who could once afford a summer festival and a holiday now have to choose one, other or neither. In the meantime, the brief VAT window enjoyed during Covid has ended, meaning you have to add 15% to your ticket price. Except, for reasons already mentioned, you can’t, so it comes off your bottom line instead. And the chancellor has recategorised diesel used for power generation so your fuel costs have gone up 43%. It’s easy to see how a business that was profitable in 2019 is now suffering ever increasing losses and is no longer sustainable.
I help run ALSO, a small ideas-based festival in the Midlands that has served an audience between 1,000 and 2,000 for the last decade. We have weathered this storm better than some, not because we’re better at running events or others have got things wrong (far from it) but the nature of our event, along with some good fortune, has shielded us from the worst of it. And these are the reasons why:
Volunteers
There is absolutely no doubt that ALSO would not be standing if it wasn’t for the phenomenal input from our volunteers. What sets us apart from other festivals is the myriad ways they can engage with the event, from the minimal to the truly collaborative. Want to get two thirds off the ticket price and work a single shift across the weekend? You’ll be welcome. Fancy joining a group of creative spirits on one of our spring build weekends, designing, building, sewing and painting? I think you’ll love it. Want to get your friends and family together in the run up so you can spend time building something truly innovative? Some of our volunteers have been doing exactly this for years. The beauty of volunteering in an economic crisis is that it solves two problems: it gives access to the event for those with limited disposable income while limiting production costs to the organisers.
Not cancelling in 2020
This was a mix of good advice, good luck and an understanding district council. In early February of that year, we’d just finished an event with the visionary business leader Margaret Heffernan and were chatting in the bar. “This virus in Wuhan isn’t going away” she said “I hope you’ve checked your insurance covers cancellation”. We hadn’t, we did and it didn’t. As the events of the year unfolded we were faced with two options: Cancel or postpone. Cancelling would most likely have meant the end of the festival – adding refunds to our on-going costs would have put us so far in the red that to continue the following year would have been impossible. Instead we offered our customers an option: Hang tight and see what we could pull together or roll-over for the following year. Most people chose the former. The first thing we did was put on a fully immersive digital festival that May to thank them for sticking with us. We tried to fit as much of the live event into the digital space as possible: we had cabaret, live music, a chef’s dinner (that you had to cook yourself), disco dancing till 3am, wild swimming (he swam, you watched). It was ridiculously ambitious but people’s desire for connection (particularly those living on their own) shone through the comments section of our digital platform. As that blazing summer wore on, it looked increasingly likely that we would be able to put on some form of ALSO IRL. In close collaboration with the local council we designed an event that would be outdoors, socially distanced and with a reduced audience that could get people together while minimising the risk of infection. The Guardian covered it, our audience loved it and no infections were reported afterwards.
Economies of scale (but not in the way you think)
By most standards, ALSO is a tiny festival. We’ve had no more than 2,400 people on site at any given time which makes for a very intimate experience and a safe and manageable crowd. As the size of an event increases there comes a point where costs start rising exponentially: The first aid team will need ambulances on site all weekend. Increased security concerns will require (sometimes literally) miles of Heras fencing, your infrastructure costs will spiral – none of this improves the audience experience but to pay for it you need to sell more tickets, so that means spending on more and bigger acts until you get to a point where you need to be selling 15,000+ tickets before those costs are absorbed. That’s a tall order in the current climate.
There are other things (in common with most events) that have brought us to this point: the team’s absolute dedication to putting on a show come hell or high water (summer ‘23, I’m looking at you), our loyal audience who come back year after year, and the incredible support of our speakers and performers who go far beyond the call of duty to put on a show in sometimes testing conditions.
So, if you’re wondering whether you can afford the luxury of a festival this year, I would urge you to look at our volunteer programme. And if you have the ear of someone in government, please beg them to answer John Rostron (CEO of the Association of Independent Festivals)’s calls for a 5% VAT rate for UK events.
Author: Sam Hyland
Sam is the assistant content manager for Event Industry News (EIN). Sam is involved in publishing news stories, videos and podcasts. Sam also collates the latest stories for the EIN e-newsletter. If you have a press release or story you think we might be interested to know about please email editor@eventindustrynews.com
