Planning, Logistics and Management

Abstract

The safe and efficient organisation of your festival is not just crucial to the artists who perform and the audiences who attend, it’s crucial to your finances, your brand reputation and, ultimately, your career. Festivals are a chance for artists to show their inventiveness and brilliance and for audiences to be transported away from the daily humdrum of everyday life; to be entertained and inspired. Those interactions between artist and audience can result in a range of outcomes from intellectually challenging, to entertaining and sometimes life-changing. But the perceived glamour that creative festivals inevitably suggest is built on the rather dull yet essential disciplines of planning and logistics. These days, given the increasing complexities of new technology and larger productions to bigger and bigger crowds, plus the creative desire to continually push boundaries and a growing concern for public welfare, planning and logistics have become ever more vital. Benjamin Franklin famously said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. It is a saying widely adopted by the military, who are generally very good at planning. We would add to that, if you fail to plan, you will also heap stress on yourself and all your problems and challenges will probably arrive at the same time.