Sustainability

We have worked hard to reduce waste and promote recycling at the festival.

We actively aim to reduce our carbon footprint through paperless ticketing, reducing the quantity of printed programmes in favour of encouraging the use of our website and social media, and by requesting those attending events to take their own litter home to recycle instead of providing multitudes of waste bins.

We no longer give out any single use plastics at any of our bars. Instead we encourage event attendees to bring their own reusable glassware or to purchase one of our reusable glasses or bamboo tumblers. Everyone is encouraged to take their bottles home to drop into their recycling boxes. Our single use plastic policy is communicated by email to all ticket-holders in advance so they come prepared. Very few complaints (less than 1% of the attending public) and our attendees seems to appreciate the thought that has gone into it. Recycling, waste and a BYOB policy resulted in a huge decrease in waste per event. One event for 330 in the marquee resulted in just 1 standard black bag of waste.

We are constantly looking for ways to make our events operation more streamlined with as little waste and impact on our environment as possible. Some of our workshops use natural materials foraged for as part of the event.

At appropriate events, we provide opportunities for local street food and bar providers to offer refreshments, and give preference to local suppliers of services such as marquee hire, mobile toilets, technical support, caterers, beverage suppliers, local freelance professionals, printers, etc.

We work with local restaurants, hotels and businesses to participate in the festival by providing services to our guests, venue rental and to give them sponsorship and advertising opportunities in our printed and online communications.

We operate a system of continuous improvement from one festival to the next based on:

• Experience from the management team and volunteers in a formal review process on what went well, what didn’t and what could be improved and be done differently next time.
• A Survey Monkey survey is sent to all ticket-buyers to gather all positive and negative feedback. By repeating this over successive festivals we can measure changes in customer satisfaction and react accordingly. We also ask what our customers would like more of at the next festival so we can take this into account for future planning. The post festival customer survey in 2023 saw an increase in the Net Promoter Score from 70 to 74, “World Class”.

Changes that we have made in this year’s festival include:

• Improved the ticket purchase function on the website and going paperless with ticketing to reduce printing cost and waste
• Inviting voluntary donations to events that have free entry
• Using different venues for some events to improve visitor experience, disabled access, increase audience capacity and attract bigger names such as Broadway Tower, Cidermill Theatre and Stanton Guildhouse.
• Improved marquee dressing to improve the visitor and performer experience at our live music nights
• Expanding the free live music offering at artBEAT over the first weekend