Building a database of our stakeholders is an ongoing work. It requires time to collect the information, maintenance, keep the data updated, and most importantly, follow up. 

The local community 

Some of the questions we need to ask from our festival’s perspective are: 

• Do we have a full understanding of our local community in terms of social and demographic characteristics? 

• What are their ages, interests, and average income? 

• How are we addressing their needs? 

• Is our local community our main target audience? Should it be? 

Artists 

It is easy to forget that the artists we present, and support are not only the heart and soul of our festival, but we also need to consider them as part of our stakeholders. 

• How do we continue to support the work of the artists that participate in our festival? 

• How do we maintain relationships and communication with our artists before, during, and after the festival? 

• How can we support their needs? 

• Is our marketing strategy in synchronization with their audience as well? 

• How are we considering them when drafting our communication and marketing strategies? 

Donors 

Development is one of the main challenges for any cultural organization; how we keep our communication and retention with our donors, while outreaching potential ones is challenging work. Some of the questions to ask as we think about our donors are: 

• How well do we know and understand our donors? 

• Do we fully understand the reasons why they support the festival? 

• Is their participation attached to specific programs we develop or is it because of financial (tax) benefits, artistic fulfilling or social (recognition) reasons? 

• Do they have any say in our Programming? 

Partners (in-kind supporters, collaborators, institutional partners, government, etc) 

A key element for our festival happening is to understand our partners as a win-win relationship. With our tight budgets, having solid partners can be a great way to find additional resources, however, keeping retention of our partners, sponsors and collaborators can be a challenge and requires work and effort. Constant communication with them is essential so we can make sure they are obtaining the benefits from the relationship they intend. 

• How can we benefit each other? 

• How can we continue to improve our efforts so we can mutually benefit each other? 

• If we are getting in-kind donations, such as airfare, hotel rooms or hospitality, we need to understand their goal for providing these items is being met. Do we have a system of tracking the impact of our festival on their product and our audiences? 

Stallholders 

Depending on the relationship and involvement of our stallholders with the running staff of the festival, we can draft an effective communication strategy to make sure their goals are being met: 

• Do we have a full understanding of their goals in terms of box-office sales, income from donors and artistic quality? 

• How often do we meet with them and receive feedback? 

Broader audiences 

Aside from local audiences, do we have an audience that travels from abroad for our Festival? 

• Do we have incidental tourists attending our events? 

• Do we have digital programming/efforts where we reach wider audiences regardless of physical location, and if so, how do we maintain communication with them? 

• When thinking “after Covid-19”, do we care about those audiences that we reached out in digital forms? 

Service providers 

Thinking of our service providers as stakeholders of a festival is not very common, however, they have a huge impact on the successful development of our festival. 

• From hospitality, concession, technical and logistics providers how do we make sure both our goals and their goals and being met? 

• Do we keep a system or statistics from previous years to see if our budgets are being met? Do we know if their budgets and sales forecasts are being met? 

Other 

A festival is constantly evolving, so it is important to keep reviewing the list of stakeholders constantly and make sure our stakeholders are evolving with our mission and vision. 

• Is our actual audience our target audience, or do we need to outreach different segments of the population? 

• Do our partners match the artistic goals of the festival? And, do they have a bond with our audiences and donors? 

• Having consistency between our artistic needs makes it easier to communicate with them and makes us a strong worthy partner.