Local Society Run Music Festivals.

The numerous small grass roots music festivals that take place in most countries every year often rely on the efforts of a small group of volunteers and are organised by local societies. They are usually local societies that cater for specialist interests in particular music genres but how do they manage to put on their small music festivals every year.    

Typically, local music societies cater for genres like, jazz, folk or traditional country music and a small town may have a society with just a few hundred members. The organisational structure of these societies is usually on a not-for-profit basis and they rely on membership fees and donations to survive. Their aims and objectives may be to promote a particular style music for the benefit of a local community audience and to support local performance artists.

Music Society Structure. 
It is very rare that any full-time staff will be employed by such small societies and the leadership will be elected by the membership each year. In a society with 500 members, they may have a leadership committee of perhaps 12 people. All roles are unpaid and the committee members will probably also have other full-time jobs. Within any committee will be a handful responsible for organising an annual music festival. 

Financial Status. 
As these local music societies are usually not-for-profit or registered charities, they will feed any profits back into the society for funding future events or admin costs. Organising a small annual music festival will usually form a key part of their annual fundraising efforts as they can potentially generate revenue from ticket sales or collaboration with local sponsors. No committee members receive any financial compensation and they give up their time for free.

Local Society Music Festivals. 
The local annual music society festival will often gain support from local authorities and councils who wish to support local initiatives that embrace community participation and provide a draw of visitors from outside the area that can benefit local businesses. The society will rely on a group of willing volunteers to help make events happen and performance artists will often perform for no fee, perhaps just coverage for travel expenses. As these small festivals are run by small organising committees and volunteers the logistics will probably be handled manually without the aid of any management software. Recently many societies have started to embrace the use of event and financial management software because it can save time and resources.

Despite the small scale of local music society festivals, it is still a thriving sector with thousands of events taking place annually. The majority of these small music festivals will continue in the same format for years to come, there are however, rare occasions when they become much larger and convert to commercially run events.

For festival organisers planning their events using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

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