This toolkit is for anyone who is running a festival or thinking of creating a festival and has questions about how to build a successful strategy for audience outreach, development and retention and audience engagement in practicable way. 

Follow festival makers from The Festival Academy’s community as they walk you through their top tips and show you the best tools in their kit to ensure long term success for your festival and your audiences.

Why this Toolkit

One of the main challenges of managing a festival is to achieve a successful strategy for audience outreach, development, and retention. This Toolkit aims to provide essential information, definitions, tools, and to create thought-provoking discussions when working on a strategy of how to effectively develop, sustain and reach audiences and stakeholders.

How to use this Toolkit

This toolkit is meant to be seen as an evolving document, which aims to provoke thoughts and discussions on how to effectively create strategies for festival managers and curators when thinking about reaching out to new audiences and retain the current ones. 

The first section of the document focuses on some of the key elements when thinking about our stakeholders, followed by elements to consider when thinking about the conversation between stakeholders and festival organizers. The remaining information on the toolkit provides specific tools and definitions of market segmentation, database management and general marketing / publicity concepts. 

We are also including a series of specific examples of festivals from Festival Academy Alumni which have dealt with interesting cases of audience outreach and retention; we aimed to include diverse voices with different approaches of some of the challenges they have faced and how have they resolved them. 

The toolkit also includes a section focused on the Covid-19 crisis and how to deal with audience development and retention during these times. This section poses a series of questions to think about on how the global crisis has affected festivals, how we can redefine our missions and how to move forward. This section was created from discussions from the attendees of the Atelier for Solidarity 2020, organized by The Festival Academy. 

Who is this Toolkit for?

Any Festival manager or artist interested to learn different ways to think outside the box on how to creatively connect with their current audience and/or outreach to new ones. From concepts such as market segmentation and understanding the differences between marketing and publicity, the user of this toolkit shall engage in thought-provoking discussions and conversations, as well as learn from cases for study which can help give a better understanding of the relationship between audiences and festivals.

How to provide feedback, amendments and additions:

The toolkits are open-sourced, continuously developed tools. Therefore, festival and cultural practitioners from all backgrounds and levels of experience are invited to expand these materials by adding their own contributions, building on the gathering of knowledge and insights shared with the whole festival-making community worldwide. Please email info@festivalacademy.eu for feedback, amendments, and additions.