This is what goes into organising a small-town festival with 5000 participants

Each year, Swanage Folk Festival puts on an incredible display of music, dancing, workshops, entertainment and family fun. Festivities spread into every inch of this pretty seaside town, which is temporarily taken over by merrymakers who want to enjoy the decades-old traditions of the festival. 

With 22 bands, 70 groups of dancers, 15 workshops, 10 fringe events, and 60 craft stalls all coming together over three days – it’s unsurprising that planning this event is no mean feat. Below, we chat with Festival Chair Jon Baker, who is kind enough to give us some in-depth insights into what exactly goes into organising a town festival on such a scale. 

There’s tons to learn here – especially for those thinking of setting up a similar event. Jon talks to us about everything from how they structure their team to working with the local council, the logistics of sourcing venues and pretty much everything in-between. Definitely a worthwhile read for budding festival and community events organisers! 

💃Let’s go!

✅ Key takeaways

📣 When organising an event with a lot of moving parts it helps to have a team that’s big enough to handle all tasks, while not being so big that communication becomes difficult.

🤝 When you need to work closely with your local council to organise an event, it’s a good idea to focus on building a really positive relationship with them. Jon talks about how they make a point of submitting forms early and supporting the council’s needs as best as they can – which means they get treated well in return 🙂.

🎟 Using a ticketing platform with an in-built donations feature helps to streamline the process of collecting donations – which is particularly handy for Swanage Folk Festival as a non-profit event. Jon talks about how their lives have been made easier by Ticket Tailor’s donations feature, which allows them to recommend a donation amount to ticket buyers. 

Swanage Folk Festival sounds and looks awesome 🙌. Give our readers a snapshot into what your festival is all about:

As the largest UK folk dance festival, the Swanage Folk Festival is a family friendly weekend of music, dance displays, workshops, craft fairs and children’s entertainment. All beside the seaside in the picturesque Victorian town of Swanage. 

How did Swanage Festival first come about?

Our festival started over thirty years ago as a day of dance, where many morris dance sides came to Swanage to thwack their sticks and jingle their bells for the locals! In turn, an evening concert was added to the event to thank the dancers. Over time the concerts got bigger, more dance sides got involved, more visitors came, and we started to attract bigger bands. 

Swanage Folk Festival is now one of the top folk festivals in the UK – we have the biggest number of dance sides of any festival, and attract some of the most well-known folk groups from around Europe.

Have you faced any major challenges over the years?

Most challenges we encounter are of the small and regular variety. For example, getting enough volunteers can be tricky – we rely on them to make everything run smoothly, and to get things done! (As a nonprofit group, we donate any surplus to local charities… and we aim to keep donating more, hopefully getting better PR for doing so.)

Many years ago, one of our marquees blew down in gale force winds, which was certainly a challenge! Back then we used smaller tents and a small marquee. Since then, we’ve started using commercial equipment and installers, so they can withstand the wind.

We’d love to know what goes into organising a festival with so many different elements?

We have a core team of 10 people who work tirelessly throughout the year. Preparing for 2025’s festival is already underway, with two months to go before 2024’s festival! 

Overall we have 22 bands on stage, 70 groups of dancers from all over the country, 15 workshops, 10 fringe events, 60 stalls in our craft fair, a ceilidh and a festival bar. All of this results in 5,000 people coming together to make a fabulous happy festival by the sea. 

In terms of planning – there are several areas to manage. We make it so that a different committee member heads up each area:

• Bands: This element of organising involves selecting the best bands across Europe, convincing them to travel to Swanage, and negotiating fees.
• Licences & permits: We need permission from town and county councils to close the main highway, use their fields, run street collections, and have buskers and dancers all around the town. We also coordinate with the local railway to run late night trains to get people back home or to their campsites and hotels.
• Workshops: We run a range of workshops over the weekend – with topics including things like dancing, singing, poetry reading, and learning about the Alexander Technique.
• Finances: The festival costs over £45k to put on. As a community-interest company we need to show that we look after the money we receive for the good causes we support. Over the weekend we collect buckets of coins and wads of notes which need counting; thank goodness for Ticket Tailor as we now sell many of our tickets online, saving huge amounts of time.
• Volunteers: To run the festival, look after the public, and make everything happen we need 396 hours of volunteer work. That means we need to recruit a lot of volunteers, train them and support them in their roles.
• Dancers: Swanage Folk Festival is the largest dance side festival in the UK. This aspect of planning involves recruiting, coordinating and looking after 70 dance sides (about 10 people in each), which takes a huge effort. We also need to coordinate getting each dance side to dance about six times around town. Of course, when finished, the dancers are thirsty! So we have a well stocked festival bar to help them recover.

On top of all of this, one of our objectives is to get more youngsters involved in folk. So we spend hours talking to local schools and we’re really proud that our Saturday morning youth music session is starting to grow. Over the next few years we want this to fill the Saturday, as these young musicians are the future of folk.

When people think of festivals, they often think ‘field’. What’s it like hosting a festival in an actual town?

As a town festival we sprawl out across 24 venues all around the town – which obviously makes us quite different from a ‘field festival’! We do use one main field, which we hire from the town council every year. This is where our main stage, craft fair and festival bar are situated.

As well as this, we negotiate 15 dance spots and busking spots around the town. Our council is incredibly supportive of what we do, as they can see the sheer number of visitors our festival draws to the town each year. We make a point of always completing the council’s forms and delivering any information they need earlier than required, and of generally supporting them where we can. The result is that they help us in return!

We also use about six pubs as fringe venues. Getting some of them involved is really easy, as they love the festival and the extra trade it brings. Others have remote landlords or management companies which means we need to spend many hours chasing, asking and cajoling!

Then there are the schools and clubs that get involved – which we’ve developed good relationships with over the years. They’re always really supportive and understand what we need.

One thing I will say is that finding new venues in a small town is hard. In some ways, finding suitable venues is one of the main constraints we have on growth.

Any advice for any budding event planners looking to start a similar, local event?

1. Get a great team around you. Make it big enough to spread the workload and small enough that you’re still able to have proper discussions with each individual.
2. Always think about succession. This isn’t just about finding new committee members, but more importantly, having a system so that any new team members understand what’s needed of them. 
3. Always keep track of what’s done and what’s yet to be done.
4. Communicate until you think you’re done, then communicate again – this is a crucial part of making sure nothing gets missed.
5. Know that change comes slowly, be patient, and stay focused on your long-term goals.

How do you go about marketing your festival?

Historically our marketing has revolved around word of mouth, local road banners, and flyering in dance and folk clubs. Over the last few years we’ve spent a lot of time using Facebook, where we have a very engaged following.

One of the most impactful marketing changes we made was the decision to target previous ticket buyers with more effective marketing emails. This, combined with early bird tickets, has meant we’ve sold an increasingly high percentage of our tickets much earlier, so we worry less when it comes to the weekend itself. 

Now let’s talk ticketing – why did you choose Ticket Tailor as your ticketing partner? 🙂

I used Ticket Tailor many years ago in a previous job. Then, I knew them as a small, but incredibly helpful company. So when I got involved in marketing the festival, I moved us away from Eventbrite (which we found to be expensive, unhelpful and not very flexible) to Ticket Tailor. 

Again, using Ticket Tailor this time around, we’ve found that the ongoing support we’ve had has been brilliant.

Have you found any features particularly useful?

A couple of features in particular have been really useful – Discount Codes and most importantly Donations.

As a non-profit, being able to easily accept donations is incredibly important to us. We love that this feature allows us to state a recommended donation at the point of ticket sale – a move that’s been very effective for us. 

I’m also interested in using Ticket Tailor’s Products feature in the future. It’d be great to sell additional products at the point of ticket sale, which could be collected at the festival.

Can you tell us a bit about your general ticketing strategy and why this works for you?

We start with ultra-early bird weekend tickets and then move onto a tier-two price. We aim to sell as many weekend tickets as we can, although the limit is that of our smallest venue. We couldn’t have 400 people turning up to a 130 seat venue, for example. 

As we get close to selling out our weekend tickets, we then start selling tickets for each concert or attraction. 

Finally, what does the future hold for Swanage Folk Festival? 

Physical space means it’s hard to grow a lot bigger, so our focus is on the quality of our festival, and “de-risking” the weekend – for example, via earlier ticket sales and donations.

We’re considering what we need to do in order to enjoy our 40th anniversary, which will fall in 2032. We want to involve more youngsters in our events both on stage and as organisers – it’s important to us that we continue to stay relevant. 

Thanks for chatting with us, Jon! There are so many great insights here for our readers.

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