Festival Box. A sustainability kit to support your festival's responsible development strategy

Festivals are transient in nature, but have a high sustainability impact. Assessing their sustainability record is a necessity for all festivals, regardless of their size and nature. In this way, organizers can become more aware of the impact, opportunities and risks, can adapt to future needs and build resilience, can strengthen their internal and external accountability, can improve the festival’s social, moral, reputational capital, and can be drivers of positive change.

Our Festival Box is a gamified method and a roadmap guiding festival organizers in planning their sustainability objectives and action. It supports the development of a sustainability strategy, scaling and adjusting measures and targets to the particular needs of the festival.

The Box builds on European requirements, festival-specific international standards and best practices from European festivals, to offer festival organizers an entire palette of tested solutions.

Enthusiasm and genuine engagement for sustainability are catalysts for further and faster development. Small and large festivals alike can have an important positive impact downstream, towards suppliers, vendors, artists and attendees, but also upstream, towards sponsors, local, regional or national governments. Thank you for taking sustainability seriously for the sake of the present and future generations!

Developing a strategy for sustainable development requires a lot of abstract thinking, vision and complex problem-solving. To support the process, we boil down abstract ideas and integrate them into a physical game to make them touchable, easier to grasp.

The design makes reference to the classic wooden building blocks, inviting the construction of a strategy through play. 

Using gamification techniques, we help festival organizers gain a thorough understanding of the fundamental concepts, the multiple aspects of sustainable development and their interdependence. 

Here again our environmental focus translates into design and production: the game is locally produced, made entirely of wood, and using left-over materials.

Unboxing sustainability

Understanding double materiality

For the development of a sustainability strategy, the concept of double materiality is key. Festival organizers need to consider the actual and potential impacts (positive and negative) of the festival on people and the environment (the inside-out view), but also the risks and opportunities derived from the dependence on natural, human and social resources, or from developments that affect the organization of the festival (the outside-in view). The use of footprints and handprints is our way to stress the importance of assessing both positive and negative impacts.

The Festival Box highlights the importance of engaging in a stakeholder analysis, proposing a list of potential stakeholders relevant for festivals. It helps organizers develop a strategy by  distinguishing between primary and secondary stakeholders, and by defining strategic choices for the engagement with them, based on their respective identified needs: defend, involve, collaborate, monitor, inform, and grow.

Reflecting on one's relationship with stakeholders

Drawing on European law & international standards

In today’s context of increasingly broad and deep legislation at EU level, with a lot of sustainability-relevant acts  complementing each other, it is easy to feel lost and with little control. Therefore, our Festival Box provides a framework that allows organizers to gather knowledge about relevant sustainability factors and potential ways to address them. Our general structure follows and brings clarity to European sustainability laws. On this structure we apply suggestions from sector-specific ISO and GRI standards, to give festival organizers an entire palette of potential viable solutions to try out. The approach is holistic, intertwining natural, social and business-related issues.