Planning a Festival? Here's What You Need to Know

Build the Right Partnerships

As Graham explained to us, festival organisation is a mammoth task, and for Leicester Riverside Festival multiple partners, emergency blue-light services and stakeholders are involved to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience for all visitors.

“Putting a festival like Riverside together isn’t just the City Council alone, we work with multiple partners to deliver this event. I think that’s what brings the richness to Riverside as a festival, is having all those different people looking forward to the festival and contributing towards it.”

The Leicester Music Board had a large part in the organisation of the festival this year. Vijay told us about what that partnership looked like and how they got involved.

“Leicester Music Board’s been involved in the Riverside Festival from earlier this year. They’ve helped programme the two days on stage and they’ve also been helping with the marketing and press releases promoting the Riverside Festival.

Leicester Music Board has been involved in programming the two days and we’ve tried to make sure that there’s a real range of music genres, different communities and just making sure there’s something for everybody across the two days.”

The Build

While for festivalgoers, sites can seem to spring up out of nowhere and vanish again just as quickly, behind the scenes a huge amount of work goes into building and breaking down the site. Rob explained how the Leicester Riverside Festival team makes it happen safely and efficiently.

“The event build itself happens from the Friday morning, before the Saturday opening. We have an internal team of us internal events officers which is the 6 full-time officers but we also use our own casual events staff which come in and help us build and de-rig the event and help us run it safely.”

Licences

In order to set up a festival, especially an inner-city festival, you need multiple licences to make sure you’re keeping your visitors safe and you’re abiding by the law. Kellie gave us some insight into what that looked like for Riverside.

“We have TheMusicLicence through PPL PRS, we also have to have a rival markets licence. We have a TEN licence (Temporary Event Notice) which is for the bars and then we have to get licences from the Canal & River Trust to use the waterways as well.”

Music

Live music is a key part of any festival, creating memorable experiences for audiences and inspiring future artists. Research by Barclaycard and Harvard University** found that 55% of participants experienced goosebumps during live music performances, with the strongest reactions typically occurring within the first minute of a set. In total, 126 goosebump moments were recorded during the study, averaging 2.8 per minute. With music playing such a central role in the festival experience, Shenèse talked us through the process of choosing the artists that perform over the festival weekend, and who is involved in that decision-making process.

“The decision for who gets to perform at the main stage is made predominantly by our partners within Leicester Music Board as well as us who support with the local enquiries from the community. We work with Leics Connect at the LeicestershireMusic Hub, and we give them a platform every year because it’s important for us to give those young people the opportunity to perform to wider than just their families and friends. For them it’s an opportunity to showcase, but equally, get that experience before they go into the big wide world. BUSK Leicester is all about showcasing local talent within our city centre. We have created this initiative to ensure that street performers and entertainers get an opportunity to come back onto our streets to create an atmosphere and keep it lively.”

Clean-up

The last thing visitors want when attending a festival is to be surrounded by rubbish. Chris provided some insight into how to keep on top of the rubbish, to not be left with a huge clean-up operation post-festival.

“We have operatives that are actually working on site during the event so it’s not so much of a clean-up operation after the event. We have 10-15 members of staff that will be going round cleaning the different areas that we use, the city council will be providing the bins for that as well so we’ll recycle as much as we can. We try to keep on top of it as the event goes along so people are in a nice clean environment.”

Safety

As Leicester’s Riverside Festival is within the city, there are some areas around the site that are closed off for the weekend. Chris explained how they co-ordinated that to reduce the impact on residents and local businesses.

“Western Boulevard is probably the main road that we have to close off. We’re quite lucky that the campus that we’re on, a lot of that is now pedestrianised so the main aspect of that is closing Western Boulevard, where you’ll see a host of stalls and different activities going on so actually the impact is pretty minimal. There’s not a huge amount of residential streets that come off of Western Boulevard so we try not to impact local businesses and residential properties as much as we can.”

Leicester City Council also worked very closely with the emergency services along with Counter Terrorism to make the festival as safe as possible, so Chris talked us through the services that provided that assistance over the weekend.

“We have multi-agency planning meetings which go into the event, we have meetings with blue-light services, so Police, EMAS (East Midlands Ambulance Service), Leicester Fire and Rescue and our Highways Team so there’s a huge amount of planning. We work really closely with the Police, especially the Counter Terrorism Unit as well so we are always planning on different ways to make sure we keep people safe at the event but also make it enjoyable as well obviously that’s the main aspect for us.”

Food & Drink

The whole team are passionate about making sure every visitor to Leicester Riverside Festival enjoys their time there. Kellie spoke to us about the food they had on offer this year and how they chose the stalls that appeared on site.

“Choosing the traders and the bars is quite a complex process. We don’t just pick and choose which ones we want; we have to grade each application that comes in. We grade them on what the prices are for the public, the tender price that they’re offering and how the store looks and how it’s going to look on site.”

“This year we’ve tried to focus in on the sustainability of them, making sure that traders are locally based, that they offer a healthy food choice alongside all their other menu items and that they offer smaller menu sizes for children. We do have a lot of applications come through so we do have to make sure that the process is done correctly.”

Activities & Entertainment

Leicester’s Riverside Festival offered a wide variety of activities for both adults and children. Kellie and Graham shared more about the range of entertainment and experiences available throughout the weekend.

“We want [charity] organizations to be able to use the event to showcase what they do. One of those charities is PROSTaid, which is a Leicester-based charity who get involved by organizing a dragon boat race on the Sunday. It’s a spectacular part of the programming. People sign up and pay to be a part of the dragon boat and that’s how PROSTaid raise money for their charity during the weekend. On the dragon boat we usually have teams of between 10 to 12, and they’ll be competing throughout the whole day on Sunday.” – Kellie

“Whether it’s dragon boat racing, free kayaking, there’s lots of different things for the public to come and experience. And then on De Montfort campus we’ve got storytelling, we’ve got Virtual Reality experiences and pop-up poetry. There are massive arts and crafts stalls all the way down Western Boulevard, and Castle Gardens as well where there’s going to be a real focus on creative health, arts and crafts and free family activities. Whether you want to come and have a go on a funfair ride, big wheel or you want to just chill with your mates down by the river and enjoy the atmosphere, there’s something for everybody at this festival” – Graham

Plan for the future

Each year while visitors are enjoying the festival, the team is already thinking ahead. Graham explained to us that planning for next year’s event begins on the very day the current festival starts.

“I walk around the site and I look at the ways that we can improve the festival experience for people coming to Riverside. We’re then in constant briefing meetings, de-briefing meetings post-event, to work out where are the areas that we need to improve on.”

Kellie also spoke to us about what we can expect from Leicester’s Riverside Festival going forward.

“The festival has grown year-on-year and I think it’s made possible by the amount of organizations in Leicester, the amount of artists and local crafters and by them all being involved in it. It allows us to grow the programme. We are hoping to move that forward year-on-year and just make it bigger and better each time.”