Skip to content

3 Ways to Meaningfully Include Diversity & Inclusion at Your Next Festival

Diversity and inclusion for your festival must be more than just representation. Your efforts should extend beyond only increasing the number of women and people of color, it should also take into account persons of varied ages, socioeconomic groups, educational backgrounds, and physical abilities. The variety of your community and surrounding areas should be reflected (and celebrated - events are supposed to be fun after all!) in your festival.

#1. Diversify your participants.
When reviewing applications for volunteers, vendors, talent, and more, diversity is an important factor to consider. Many times women, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), LGBTQIA+, neuro-divergent, and disabled participants are overlooked. However, these participants supply new outlooks, opinions, and experiences that will not only help your event succeed and grow but also make a larger group of your community and festival participants feel welcome.

Embracing Your Community:
  • Include bi-lingual ticket scanners/volunteers. 
  • Invite performers, speakers, and vendors who embody the unique diversity of your community through art, dance, music, food, activism, and more. 

#2. Name pronunciation, preferences, and pronouns.
Take the time to collect important identity information from your participants to ensure their name is being pronounced correctly, their preferred name is being used, and participants are being addressed with the correct pronouns.

Implementation Strategy: 

  • Include pronunciation of participant’s preferred name and pronouns on name badges if used at your event. 
  • Use Eventeny’s custom question builder in all applications and ticket tools to collect inclusive identity information.

#3. Diversify your marketing.
Double check all of your marketing materials are inclusive and represent your entire community before releasing them! Below is a checklist to get you started:

Diverse Marketing Checklist

  • Are the graphics and images used in our materials inclusive of our community?
  • Is all communication translated and inclusive of our bi-lingual community?
  • Does our website meet accessibility standards?
  • Is our communication direct and straightforward for our neuro-divergent community?     

Need help with this? Let's chat!

Want to learn more about how Eventeny can help you create applications for your event that foster diversity and inclusion? Chat with us at booths 308 & 310 here at FFEA!

In the meantime, learn more about Eventeny here!