How to re-imagine your event for COVID-19

Online events aren’t an easy sell; it’s hard to ask people who are online all day at home for work to stay online at home for recreation.

We have screen fatigue and Zoom fatigue.

For a festival not to have any kind of physical gathering seems like it’s missing an essential glue; the ingredient that you can’t replicate virtually. 

People want to do things outside the home, and outside. In fact, some events have a captured audience like they’ve never had before.

However, people need to feel safe. 

Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia each have guidelines for how to hold COVID-safe events 

 On the other side, events need to generate revenue from new sources in the absence of ticket sales, food & beverage income and departed sponsors. Even event organisers that are not seeking to make a profit need to break even, find new sources of income, and monetise elements of their events.  

Create NSW has a practical guide on how to create new income streams

How do we do this? 

How do we continue to deliver our great festivals and events in a COVID safe world while still maintaining financial viability and brand reputation? 

Maybe a better question is, can we do it? 

The answer to this will vary for individual festivals and events, so we have put together some things for you to consider as you explore the future of your event…

Examples of brightening life for the community

Because it was not possible to have 5,000 people together in a field this year Maindee Festival is using creative activities to bring a smile to the community:

• Giving residents and planting sunflower seeds in the lead up to the festival, so the town is covered in flowers from the library to the school and everywhere in between, along with a series of colourful giant flowers on parade outside the library. Residents are encouraged to take selfies and photos and share them on social media. 
• Four hours of online performance, poetry and music hosted on the Maindee Festival Facebook page
• Maindee residents have been nominating friends to receive a personalised delivered dance-o-gram message from dance group Kitsch n Sync

For Belgrave, the thought of a winter solstice without their Lantern Parade was too much to bear so the event was reinvented. The community was encouraged to create new lanterns or dust off their old ones, and pop them in windows of homes, workplaces, classrooms, shops and clubs. Belgrave was transformed into a glowing public-art installation, showcasing community- and artist-made lanterns woven throughout shopfront windows and the main street.

Waldensian Festival added a variety of events including 

• Name that Native and Valdese Trivia hosted by the Town of Valdese social media accounts. During this week, followers were challenged by regular creative clues featuring historic figures and facts about the Valdese community
• Where’s Waldo Scavenger Hunt with clues leading participants to discover not only Waldo (a local historical figure), but also attractions and photo opportunities in Valdese. Clues were available for download online
• 2D Open Art Competition hosted online
• Historic outdoor drama performance with socially-distanced seating
• The Glorious Return Shop Hop with shoppers invited to visit at least 15 out of 22 participating local businesses for a stamp to enter to win prizes

Example of supporting the industry 

Music festival Under the Southern Stars is dedicated to helping support workers in the music industry (because if events lose suppliers permanently as businesses close and staff move on to other jobs, events will not be able to take place even if COVID is controlled). 

The festival asked attendees to make tax-deductible donations to Support Act, Australia’s only charity delivering crisis relief services to artists, crew and music workers whose ability to work in music has been impacted. 

The festival also set up a rigorous system to keep their live bands COVID-free.

Example of creating a legacy tourist attraction

Consider changing up your event completely to create a tourism attraction legacy for your town such as street art murals or a sculpture trail. 

Vancouver Mural Festival had 60 murals painted. Elements of their mural festival included

• the opportunity to watch artists paint murals 
• an app to help users locate 250 existing murals with an interactive map, and learn about the artists, filter murals by location and interest, and check out curated collections – an ideal way to explore neighbourhoods or for attendees to create their own mural walk
• free, daily tours to give art lovers the chance to learn about the region’s murals and social history, and how it became a hub for the public art festival
• Downtown Shopfront Mural Exhibition – a photography exhibit and a collection of temporary murals featuring original plywood installations painted in the lead up to the festival during a #MakeArtWhileApart campaign
• hosting a contest with prizes to make mural hunting more exciting (prizes provided by local sponsors to showcase local businesses)
• an online gallery showcasing 100 original pieces of art from local artists for sale 
• Pop-Up Patio series of performances in collaboration with a brewery featuring live music, drag, comedy, and burlesque from local curators, performers, and collectives
• Curator Talk on how the festival selects its artists and its curation process

Examples of hosting a hybrid event of physical and online elements

Beloit International Film Festival is running a hybrid event with films available at venues with socially-distanced seating, and offering all of the films online, using a company to manage the virtual part of the festival. Having the films online and in-person allows attendees to choose which option is most comfortable for them, and allows the festival to continue with just the online portion if there is another shutdown. 

Melbourne Fringe developed a physical distance rating for its events which are searchable in the online guide so attendees can make informed decisions about what they’re comfortable attending. 

Film festivals can transition well to being virtual events because they are already working in a well-established online genre, which can monetize in the same way as pay-per-view videos in a streaming service.

Even how the Beloit festival ran pre-screenings of films for the selection committee could be used as inspiration for a COVID-safe festival element. It ran films to small groups of four who watched the films together at home and then connected online to discuss them with other groups.

SALA (South Australian Living Artists) Festival has 300 exhibitions online (1/3) and in spaces ranging from galleries, cafes and wineries to public parks, footpaths and windows (2/3). Some of the 4,000 artists represented have created virtual tours of their studios and filmed themselves talking about their art. The annual SALA Forum is now the SALA Podcast, featuring interviews with artists discussing their artwork, inspiration and creative lives.

The world’s northernmost jazz festival Varanger Festival in Norway normally sells 12,000 tickets but with social distancing rules they have moved the festival to a venue which only normally has a capacity of 250 but which has been reduced to 86. With 13 concerts in all, this gives the festival a total capacity of 1,118 tickets. Livestream tickets are priced at half to one quarter of tickets for the physical shows.

Carnaval del Sol in Vancouver has gone for a hybridized format featuring live outdoor events, culinary and cultural showcases at participating local restaurants, and online lectures and forums.

From livestreams to digital breakout rooms, focus on ways you can make the event experience as seamless as possible for your onsite and online audiences. Encourage your onsite attendees to participate in the same digital discussions as virtual attendees.

Examples of going 100% online

The main concern of Ireland’s Earagail Arts Festival was supporting artists, so they contacted the participating artists and asked them to re-imagine their work and how it could be presented to an audience which would now be primarily online. The artists took on the challenge with enthusiasm, and with videographers and other experts, a re-invented festival came together. 

Edinburgh International Festival along with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Edinburgh International Book Festival have been reinvented for a three-week event as digital arts and distanced installations, that recreate the Festival City buzz safely. 

The Edinburgh Festival Chorus is at the heart of the program. Every year since 1965, singers from Scotland have performed with world leading artists, orchestras and conductors in concerts. In true resilient festival spirit, they managed to create a unique virtual recorded performance of ‘Ecce Gratum’ and ‘O Fortuna’ from Orff’s Carmina Burana. It’s worth a watch – there are some quirky settings for the singers!

An online event might be able to include bigger stars who might not be able to be brought to the destination under normal circumstances due to cost.

The Sydney Edible Garden Trail (21-22 March!) had just a couple of days to reinvent their event when COVID shut down Australia. Garden tours were live broadcast by a celebrity gardener to a much more geographically diverse audience, who clamoured to purchase branded merchandise.

Vancouver’s Indian Summer Festival drove forward into digital presentations rather than hold out any hope for changes to rules around venue openings and so on. 

Smart tech specialist Sauce helped reinvent the UK’s Freedom Festival, the city of Hull’s biggest arts festival as an interactive, year-round digital experience, with the program of events broadcast digitally via an app.

If you run your event online but want to showcase your destination for later travel, consider partnering with your local or regional tourism organisation on a direct mailing piece that provides a taste of the region to guests who aren’t able to travel there in person.

Inspire attendees to tune in with personality, such as this example of tempting copywriting 

Examples of boutique events

Small scale performances, particularly in outdoor venues, offer less risk of infection (excluding singing and comedy as unamplified singing and laughter transmit saliva particles into the air) such as amplified singing, dance, plays, magic, musicians, talks, panel discussions, acrobatics, street theatre, chef and artist demonstrations, and workshops like song writing. 

Glyndebourne country house in England hosts a picnic and opera in a similar vein that would be more COVID safe if the opera was performed outdoors.

Diner en Blanc is a global phenomenon that can be held in a social-distanced way, particularly in regional areas with smaller numbers of attendees. Attendees wear formal white attire and bring their own table and dinnerware to a secret location revealed at the last minute, such as a zoo, boat, or park. Attendees would drive or bus to the catered event with their tablemates and would only mingle with their own table.

Other ways to reimagine festivals and events

Live and socially-distanced event ideas include

• drive-in food fair, films, concert or performance 
• markets
• bespoke high-end events targeting high value visitors such as a beach dance party with a smaller number of attendees spread across the beach
• festivals with cluster seating using pods or raised platforms for family/friend groups
• festivals spread across multiple venues each with their own COVID-safe plan

Run a COVID-safe trade show or fair

Australian Events, based in Queensland, operate 15 major annual consumer and trade events such as caravan and camping shows. They have worked closely with Public Health Units across Queensland to deliver safe and compliant events for patrons, exhibitors, contractors and staff.

So far they have successfully delivered the first three major expos in Queensland, leading the way for the events industry, by implementing a range of tactics to ensure the way their events take place reduce the risk of infection.

 Keep athletes participating 

Ironman went virtual with a platform to build community and facilitate training and racing. The races are being broadcast live on Facebook. All this while raising funds for communities around the world! Other participatory events are using apps so participants can compete virtually.

Replace your parade 

Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers is replacing its street parade which attracts 50,000 attendees with a parade of mini floats created on remote control cars in the city’s main shopping centre (which is the sponsor of the parade). This will support local businesses.

Staying live / Staying alive…

One UK festival director suggested compulsory virus testing for attendees with negative test results permitting attendees to enter. He argued that social distancing doesn't work at festivals as festivals need to be "full houses" in order to be economically viable, and more than a year of revenue loss from postponed and cancelled events can’t be sustained by event promoters.

While he would like the government to adopt the idea as policy, tests don't always pick up the virus in its early stages, and there’s also a window between attendees being tested and going to the festival when they could contract the virus. 

Of course, there is always the COVID-safe festival suit! 

Learn more

We’ll be expanding on this topic with more in-depth case studies in our upcoming Master Class on reinvigorating events in response to COVID-19 (21 September), including

• events spread across multiple venues
• a heartwarming hybrid event to support a tourism community devastatingly impacted by bushfire and COVID
• how a QLD music festival will go ahead, COVID safe, this September.

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