Imagine a festival where every team member knows the plan, every department is in sync, and no detail is overlooked. This level of harmony doesn’t happen by accident – it’s the result of diligent coordination meetings and on-site walkthroughs. Regular check-ins keep everyone aligned and allow the production team to catch issues early. Whether organizing a local community fair or a massive international music festival, successful producers rely on structured meetings to ensure nothing falls through the cracks between departments.
The Power of Regular Check-Ins
Regular coordination meetings are the backbone of festival project management. Top festival organizers schedule consistent check-ins throughout the planning timeline. Early in the planning (several months out), this might mean monthly meetings with core team members, gradually increasing to biweekly and then weekly meetings as the event date approaches. These sessions create a forum for each department – operations, marketing, talent booking, logistics, security, and more – to update others on progress and flag any concerns. By having weekly production meetings, all parties stay moving in the same direction and department leaders can align their plans with each other (fellow.app). In practice, this could be a video call or in-person meeting where a shared agenda ensures every key area (from stage design to food vendors) is discussed.
Why such frequent meetings? Consistency in communication prevents silos. Festival production involves many moving parts, and it’s easy for one team to make a decision that inadvertently impacts another. For example, the site operations team might decide to change the layout of food trucks, but without a meeting, the security team might not learn of this change until it’s too late to adjust the security camera placements. Regular check-ins force these updates into the open. They also build accountability – when each department head knows they will be reporting status weekly, tasks are more likely to stay on schedule. Additionally, involving a project coordinator or production manager to moderate these meetings helps keep them efficient: starting on time, sticking to priority agenda items, and pushing irrelevant details to follow-up offline discussions. The result is a team that’s informed, engaged, and ready to tackle issues collaboratively rather than operating in isolation.
Production Calls with Department Heads
As the festival draws nearer, coordination often shifts into an even higher gear with focused production calls that include all department heads. These calls (often held weekly, and even daily in the final countdown week) function as high-level scrums for the festival’s leadership. Each department head – from staging and technical production to marketing, hospitality, ticketing, and safety – gives a brief update on their area. This format ensures everyone hears the latest developments together. If the marketing team reports a surge in ticket sales that will affect entrance foot traffic, the operations and security leads can immediately factor that into their staffing or gate layout plans. If the weather forecast turns poor, the technical production lead can discuss contingency plans with the site manager and vendor coordinator on the call, rather than having those conversations in silos.
These production calls are typically short and structured. A common approach is to use a round-robin update format: each lead shares any new information, decisions needed, or problems encountered since the last meeting. Critical issues that require cross-department solutions are identified and assigned for follow-up. For instance, the production manager might note that the main stage lighting installation is behind schedule; in the call, the site operations team and stage crew can coordinate an adjusted timeline or extra overnight work to catch up. In one real-world scenario, a festival production call revealed that two departments had unknowingly scheduled major activities at the same time in the same area – a vendor supply delivery and a sound check on the main stage. Because all heads were on the line together, they caught the conflict early and rescheduled the vendor delivery to avoid a bottleneck. Without that call, the clash would likely have played out on-site, causing delays and frustration.
Importantly, these calls should include any third-party partners or contractors who play a big role in execution. If the festival has a major staging company building structures or a catering company running food courts, a representative from those teams might join certain calls leading up to the event. This inclusive approach mirrors what experienced conference planners call a “pre-conference call” – bringing all key players into one conversation. By hearing each other’s updates, department heads gain a 360-degree view of the event status. It fosters a problem-solving mindset across the leadership: rather than “my department vs. yours,” the focus becomes “we’re all working on the same festival,” reinforcing teamwork and trust among the production crew.
On-Site Walkthroughs and Pre-Event Inspections
A few days before gates open, it’s time for the on-site walkthrough – one of the most critical coordination practices in festival production. This is when the planning moves from conference rooms and phone calls to the actual venue. The festival site (be it a field, park, street, or venue complex) becomes the meeting room for a final in-person review with key stakeholders: the promoter/organizer, the production manager, security and safety chiefs, department heads, and often city officials such as fire marshals, police representatives, or permitting authorities. Walking the grounds together is an invaluable exercise to ensure that plans on paper align with reality on the field.
During an on-site walkthrough, the group will tour the entire festival layout. They start at the entrance gates, confirming queue setups, ticket scanning areas, and security checkpoints. Is the signage clear for arriving attendees? Are there enough barricades to channel lines safely? Next, they might visit the stages and performance areas, double-checking that staging is complete and structurally sound, and that emergency exit routes around those areas are unobstructed. The team will also inspect vendor areas and facilities – from food stall placements and power supply cabling to first-aid tents and water stations – to verify everything matches the operational plan. As they move through each zone, stakeholders have the chance to raise concerns on the spot. For example, a city fire marshal might notice a fire lane that’s inadvertently been partially blocked by a generator and request it be cleared; the operations team can address that immediately. A security director could point out a corner of the fencing line that needs additional lighting or an extra CCTV camera. By catching these issues in the walkthrough, the crew can fix them before the festival opens rather than scrambling during the event.
These walkthroughs function as a live drill for the festival team. They encourage face-to-face collaboration at a moment when changes can still be made relatively easily. Often, just having all parties in the same physical space helps unveil logistical problems that no one noticed in planning. Did two vendors plan on using the same loading dock at 4 PM? Does the site have room for four supply trucks arriving at once? By reviewing the load-in and schedule together on-site, such conflicts come to light and can be resolved collaboratively (reinventingevents.com). It’s also a chance to verify that interdependent tasks are sequenced correctly – for instance, ensuring the tent contractor has finished setting up the catering tent before the caterers arrive to stock it (reinventingevents.com). This level of coordination prevents last-minute chaos. Additionally, meeting face-to-face allows team members who’ve only emailed or teleconferenced to put names to faces, strengthening the working relationships. The stakeholders from local agencies (fire, police, health department, etc.) will leave the walkthrough feeling more confident in the event’s preparations, having seen the safety measures and contingency plans first-hand. In many municipalities, a formal site walkthrough and safety inspection with officials is required to get final approval for the event license – essentially a multi-agency sign-off that everything is ready. Even when not mandated, wise organizers treat this step as essential for a smooth opening day.
Keeping Departments Aligned and Accountable
The ultimate goal of all these meetings and walkthroughs is alignment – ensuring every department and stakeholder is on the same page. Festivals have a myriad of components: booking artists, selling tickets, marketing to fans, building stages, arranging food and vendors, managing volunteers, handling crowd safety, and more. If any one component operates in a vacuum, it can undermine the entire event. For example, marketing and production must coordinate closely; otherwise you might end up with a festival that’s wildly successful in ticket sales but logistically unprepared, or one that has great infrastructure but poor attendance (www.jumialuko.com). Veteran producers know that marketing teams should not promise amenities or experiences that the operations team hasn’t signed off on. Likewise, the operations team needs to know marketing’s commitments (like VIP experiences or sponsor activations) well in advance so they can accommodate them. Regular coordination meetings often include liaisons from marketing, ticketing, and sponsorship departments for this very reason – to connect the front-of-house promises with back-of-house realities.
Budgeting and finance is another area that benefits from cross-department meetings. In planning, it’s easy for department heads to get carried away with gold-plated ideas (a bigger stage here, extra lighting there) without realizing the budget implications. Having a finance or budget manager present in key meetings – or at least reviewing the minutes – injects a dose of fiscal discipline. For instance, if the production team proposes adding an extra video screen at the last minute, the finance representative can immediately flag whether contingency funds exist for it. This doesn’t mean creativity is stifled; rather, it ensures that any changes are financially viable and that cost overruns aren’t discovered only after the festival. By discussing plans together, an operations head might learn that the special effects team hired an expensive generator, and decide to share power resources to save money. Nothing is more dangerous to a festival’s budget than departments working in isolation and accidentally duplicating costs or orders. Meetings create transparency: everyone knows what everyone else is doing and spending, which helps keep the festival on budget.
From a risk management perspective, coordination meetings are an early warning system. Team members can voice concerns and brainstorm solutions collectively. For example, the security manager might raise a potential risk about overcrowding in one stage area after a big artist is announced; the team can then plan mitigation – perhaps by expanding the viewing area or adding more crowd barriers – well ahead of time. Similarly, a medical coordinator might inform the group about heatwave conditions expected during the event, prompting operations to order extra water stations and shade tents. When departments communicate, risks that one group foresees are appreciated by all, and contingency plans become a shared responsibility. This collaborative approach to risk ensures no single point of failure – if one team overlooks something, others can catch it. It’s far better to address a safety or logistic risk in a meeting room than on the festival day in front of thousands of attendees.
Tailoring Communication to Festival Scale and Type
The structure and frequency of coordination meetings should be scaled to the size and nature of the festival. There’s no one-size-fits-all. For small-scale festivals (perhaps a local food & wine fair or a one-day community music event), the core team might be relatively small – maybe just a handful of staff or volunteers wearing multiple hats. In such cases, formal weekly meetings might be overkill in early planning; instead, a monthly all-hands meeting could suffice until the event draws closer. However, even small events benefit from scheduled check-ins. They ensure that volunteers and staff don’t assume “someone else” is handling a task. For example, at a neighborhood art festival, a simple biweekly call among the coordinator, the sound technician, and the city park representative can prevent miscommunications like double-booking the same space or failing to arrange electrical access. Small festivals often have informal communication (since everyone knows each other), but the disciplined practice of official coordination sessions adds a layer of professionalism that can catch details casual chats might miss.
Large-scale festivals, on the other hand, demand a more robust communication framework. A major multi-day music festival with 50,000+ attendees will typically have numerous departments and subcontractors, which in turn may hold their own internal meetings. For instance, the security team of a big festival might have separate detailed planning meetings for their personnel, the production/technical crew will have production-specific meetings or site visits with staging and AV providers, and the marketing team will have marketing kickoff meetings. It then becomes crucial to tie all these threads together. Large festivals often implement a tiered meeting structure: weekly leadership meetings with heads of each department (to share high-level updates), supplemented by daily operations stand-up meetings in the final week as the site build is happening. In some cases, large events even form specialized subcommittees that meet on focused issues – such as a traffic and transportation committee working with city transit officials, or a health and safety committee coordinating with medical services. These sub-groups report back to the main production meeting so that everyone remains aware of critical developments. As an example, the organizers of a huge weekend festival might convene a daily 8 a.m. on-site briefing during the event, where department heads from site ops, security, medical, and city police gather to review the prior day and plan for the current day. Such rigorous coordination is often the only way to manage an event of that magnitude without incident.
Communications should also be tailored to the type of festival and its audience. Different genres and audiences come with unique considerations that should find their way into meeting agendas. If it’s a music festival geared toward young adults, discussions might emphasize security checks (for items like illegal substances) and welfare services (like free water, cooling stations, or drug awareness teams) – topics that need coordination with local law enforcement or health NGOs. An all-ages family festival, by contrast, will focus on lost-child protocols, stroller accessibility, and child-friendly amenities; production meetings might include the family services coordinator or even local child welfare officers to ensure the event is prepared for younger attendees. A food festival or beer festival will involve the health department in both planning meetings and the on-site walkthrough to check food safety and alcohol service compliance. If the event is a film festival spread across multiple theaters, coordination meetings will revolve around venue scheduling, ticketing systems, and volunteer usher staffing at each location – making communication between venue managers and the central production team vital. In every case, the demographic and theme of the festival shape what issues are mission-critical. Smart producers adjust their meeting rosters accordingly, sometimes bringing in external stakeholders (like transit authorities for a downtown parade, or sanitation services for a large camping festival) at the right times to coordinate plans. This adaptability ensures that the unique challenges of each festival are addressed by the right people, at the right time.
Learning from Successes and Missteps
Every seasoned festival organizer has war stories about things that went wrong and how good communication either saved the day or, in its absence, made a problem worse. A positive example comes from a large international music festival which credits its daily department-head calls in the final month for averting major issues. In one instance, the staging team realized during a call that the lighting vendor hadn’t been told about a last-minute stage design change; they quickly shared updated schematics and avoided a situation where lights would have been hung incorrectly. The lighting crew later remarked that without that timely communication, the opening night show might have been delayed by hours to re-rig the lights. This shows how a simple conversation can translate directly into an operational success on the ground.
On the flip side, industry veterans have witnessed the consequences of poor coordination. The infamous Fyre Festival in 2017 is a dramatic cautionary tale often cited in event circles. Among its many failures was a breakdown in communication and planning. Departments worked at cross-purposes and critical information didn’t reach the people who needed it, resulting in a disastrously underprepared site and a public relations nightmare. Post-mortems of Fyre Festival highlight that clear, transparent communication with all stakeholders was sorely lacking (apertureabc.com). In simpler terms, there were likely not enough honest, all-hands production meetings to surface the reality of what was and wasn’t getting done. While most festivals will (thankfully) never approach that level of chaos, smaller missteps can still tarnish an event. For example, a regional food festival once failed to coordinate between its vendor team and its marketing team; the marketing department kept promoting a certain food truck that, unbeknownst to them, had pulled out of the event. The lack of an internal update meeting meant the promotional material wasn’t corrected until guests showed up asking for a vendor that wasn’t there – an embarrassing oversight that could have been prevented with better cross-team communication.
These anecdotes underline a key lesson: planning in silos is a recipe for problems. Conversely, festivals that encourage open dialogue and regular status checks tend to navigate surprises far more effectively. In practice, even when things do go wrong (which at some point, they inevitably will – perhaps a storm hits the site, or a headline artist cancels last-minute), a well-coordinated team can pivot and respond as one unit. When a festival’s various departments have been communicating all along, they develop a mutual understanding and respect. This camaraderie proves invaluable under pressure, as departments will be quicker to support each other and cover gaps. A production crew that has bonded through weekly problem-solving sessions is far more resilient when real challenges arise on event day.
Best Practices for Effective Meetings
Having the meetings is half the battle; running them effectively is the other half. Here are a few mentor-tested tips to get the most out of your coordination meetings:
- Set a clear agenda: Distribute a meeting agenda beforehand, listing topics or departments that will report. This keeps meetings focused and ensures no critical topic is skipped. For example, list out: venue update, permits update, marketing update, vendor update, etc., and stick to those items.
- Time-box the discussions: Festival teams are busy, so respect everyone’s time. If weekly meetings are scheduled for one hour, aim to finish within that time. For particularly large festivals, consider splitting logistics-focused topics and creative/marketing topics into separate meetings to keep each efficient.
- Invite the right people: Ensure all key department leads (and relevant external partners) are present, but avoid overloading meetings with those who aren’t needed for a given discussion. A tight, relevant attendee list leads to better decisions. Others can be kept informed with emailed minutes.
- Encourage open communication: Create an atmosphere where team members feel comfortable bringing up problems or admitting delays. The point of coordination meetings is to fix issues together, not to assign blame. Lead by example – leadership should be transparent about challenges, setting the tone for others to do the same.
- Document and follow up: Assign someone to take notes on decisions made and action items assigned. After each meeting, circulate a brief summary highlighting what was agreed upon, who is responsible for what task, and any deadlines. This written record ensures accountability. By the next meeting, you can revisit these action items to track progress.
- Use collaborative tools: Leverage project management tools or shared documents (timelines, checklists, site maps) that all departments can access and update. Screen-sharing a live checklist during a virtual call, for instance, allows everyone to literally get on the same page. These tools complement meetings by keeping information centralized between calls.
By following these practices, a festival production team maximizes the value of their coordination sessions. It turns meetings from a dreaded obligation into a powerful management tool – one that surfaces critical information, drives collective decision-making, and reinforces a culture of teamwork.
Key Takeaways
- Schedule regular coordination meetings early and often during festival planning – start monthly (or biweekly) and increase to weekly as the event nears to keep everyone in sync.
- Include all department heads (and key contractors) in production calls so that each facet of the festival – from marketing to operations to finance – is aligned and aware of the others’ plans.
- Use meetings to identify and solve issues collaboratively. Encourage team members to raise concerns or conflicts in these forums so they can be addressed openly, preventing last-minute surprises on-site.
- Conduct an on-site walkthrough with stakeholders (organizers, security, medical, city officials, etc.) a few days before opening. This final review ensures the physical setup matches the plan, safety measures are in place, and any discrepancies are corrected before attendees arrive.
- Adapt the meeting frequency and format to the scale of your festival. Larger events may need multiple focused meetings (and daily briefings during the event), while smaller festivals might scale back the number of meetings – but they should never eliminate them entirely.
- Keep communication inclusive but efficient. Make sure all voices are heard (especially those related to safety and guest experience), but use agendas, time limits, and follow-up notes to keep discussions productive.
- Learn from every festival. Post-event, review what communication practices worked and what didn’t. Continuous improvement in coordination processes will benefit your next festival, creating a cycle of ever-smoother productions.
25th August 2025