Awareness Concepts
- Examples: SPEX Festival, Roskilde Festival, Flow Festival, Fluid Festival, Reeperbahn Festival
- Keywords: Awareness, awareness concept, action cards
Roskilde Festival: Roskilde, Denmark | 8 days | Roskilde Dyrskueplads | 130,000 visitors | Since 1971
Reeperbahn Festival: Hamburg, Germany | 4 days | venues at and around Reeperbahn | 50,000 visitors | Since 2006
Flow Festival: Helsinki, Finland | 3 days | Suvilahti | capacity: 28,000 | Since 2004
SPEX: Bern, Switzerland | 2 days | Freigelände Bernexpo (Hyspaplatz) | capacity: 10,000 | Since 2023
Fluid Festival: Mildenberg, Germany | 3 days | Ziegeleipark Mildenberg | capacity: 1,500 | Since 2022
How does a festival define a safer space? Which measures are in place to make everyone feel welcome and comfortable? Where can you get help, if a situation arose that you or someone else didn’t feel safe in?
All those questions and many more can be answered in a festival’s awareness concept. This kind of concept can help
- staff to know how to handle certain situations.
- visitors to prepare and look up who to contact and how if they are feeling unwell at the festival.
- visitors feel calm before the festival, just by knowing that there are structures and spaces to rely on.
So, it is crucial to communicate your concept beforehand and at the festival to let everyone know what your event’s awareness offers are.
Ideally, all staff and external services also know about your measures before the festival. They are your extended arm and usually the first ones visitors can reach at any moment on the festival site. For example, to support this, Roskilde Festival implemented action cards for all their volunteers and providers. The cards fit into their pockets and help deal with any kind of situation.
A well-thought-out Awareness Concept should ideally include the following:
- A trigger warning
- A definition of “Awareness”
- Your festival’s statement about how you handle cases
- Guidelines on how staff, artists, service providers, visitors and everyone else at your festival should behave towards others (also called “code of conduct”)
- What happens if the latter is not the case
- Awareness measures (safer spaces, awareness teams, etc.)
- Where to get help before, at and after the festival
For an Awareness Concept to work at your festival, it is important to not just copy/paste the concept of other festivals but think about your visitors, site and type of festival and plan measures and contact points accordingly. A city festival has different specifications than a festival in the field (no mobile reception, for example).
Some useful examples:
- Roskilde Festival Code of Conduct
- Roskilde Festival Action Cards (read more: ‘Go / No Go – A Game of Boundaries’)
- Reeperbahn Festival Awareness concept
- Flow Festival Code of Conduct
- SPEX Awareness Concept (only available in German)
- Fluid Festival Awareness Concept