In the conservation world, one of our greatest tools for building a constituency of support is festivals. Across the world, festivals celebrate migration, birds, and wetlands. When the world closed because of the pandemic in March 2020, festivals seemed instantly lost from our toolkit. However, the need to engage communities in conservation was as present ever, and people were craving opportunities to escape their quarantine situation to connect with nature and wildlife.
Festival organizers adapted their programs, creating virtual programming or self-directed opportunities. As restrictions continue into 2021, here are some recommendations to consider if you’ll be adding virtual elements to your festival.
1. Why a festival?
What are your festival’s objectives? Education to build a constituency of support, connecting to non-traditional audiences, recruiting and training volunteers, or increasing organizational members? Many organizations find that virtual festivals have allowed them to continue to reach new stakeholders, create long-term connections through social media, or expand newsletter mailing lists.
One area that virtual festivals often struggle with is developing economic opportunities for local communities. With everything shifted online, a festival that is aimed to bring tourists to a community will not be able to meet that objective. However, by sharing photos and stories from the field or past festivals or hosting education webinars, as New Jersey Audubon did for the Spring and Fall migration festivals, you can attract future visitors. These festivals are major tourism draws for Cape May County in New Jersey and their online festivals helped keep them in the public eye.
2. Build a team
More partners bring more resources, skills, and people power. Virtual or not, having a diverse set of partners brings together the networks of many partners and ensures that the right set of participants are invited, including non-traditional stakeholders. Partners to consider collaborating with include government agencies, including business or tourism agencies, local businesses, community groups, elected officials, schools, and artisans.
Keep in mind, the more diverse your team, the more thoughts, ideas, and opinions you will have. That’s a good thing, but it can add to the planning time, so make sure to build your team early.
3. Fun for kids, fun for everyone
There is no shortage of fun and interactive games at an in-person event to teach kids (and adults) about shorebirds and the environment. But it becomes a challenge when we move the festival online. We lose the hands-on engagement that is more effective in creating a connection.
However, there are quite a few online activities that you can use to replicate that connection. Many recent virtual festivals have created opportunities for families to get outside and hopefully see birds. You can create a scavenger hunt, nature journal challenge, or a bingo card that can be specific to shorebirds and wetlands. Do you have an artist or art teacher on your festival team? A ‘painting birds’ tutorial can be done online and is a great way to bring art into the festival.
Poster from the 8th Annual Shorebird Festival at Rio Gallegos – Bingo card from Copper River Delta Shorebird Bird Festival – Excerpt from Drawing Birds book by Terra Peninsular
4. What about the birds?
One of the unifying features of bird festivals is they want people to connect to birds. Even in the best circumstances, weather, timing, and difficulty accessing habitats can make shorebirds challenging to connect with. For the virtual festival, live events on Facebook or prerecorded field trips allow you to share expertise with your community. Creating a map and self-guided trail can allow participants to check out the site on their own. Just make sure you also provide information on accessibility, timing with tides, and the best window of dates.
Other ideas for engaging your community with birds include social media contests, educational/training webinars, or an interview with an expert biologist or conservation leader.
5. Getting people there!
Even when ‘getting there’ is as simple as turning on the computer, getting people to come to your festival is still one of the greatest challenges you will face. Many of the same promotion tools for an in-person event remain the same for a festival—social media ads/promotion, schools, local businesses, partner networks, and promotion in newspapers and magazines.
In-person festivals often use music, games, food, vendors, or cultural connections to attract new stakeholders, who might even be new to birds or even environmental issues. To bring in new stakeholders, consider co-hosting the festival or one of the events with a partner. For example, if you would like to reduce disturbance from kite surfing, host a webinar that celebrates the magnificent migration of shorebirds with local kite surfing leaders’ extreme feats.
6. Invite your leaders
Festivals are a good opportunity to invite leaders to large events or personal field trips where they can learn more about your work or recognize them for their positive contributions to conservation. To adapt this virtually, consider having them participate in a panel discussion or provide an introduction to your webinar. You could also consider presenting an award at the beginning or end of a popular webinar.
In the 8th Annual Shorebird Festival at Rio Gallegos, the community was engaged with fun activities and webinars with conservation discussions. “Our work to build community support for shorebird conservation never sleeps and we knew we could not miss a festival. Continuing our festival online allowed us to bring shorebirds to the community with music, kids activities, and a panel discussion with conservation leaders.” said, Germán Montero, Executive Director, Asociación Ambiente Sur.
7. Is it working?
When evaluating a virtual festival, there are a couple of simple tools available. Basic social media metrics will monitor participation in your activities—number of views, likes, clicks, etc. Reviewing which activities received higher numbers of participation will help you build programs in the future with activities that are of interest and allow you to skip less popular activities. In 2020, Environment for the Americas (EFTA) and their partners quickly adapted World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD) with virtual activities. They tracked participation in the webinars and other activities and found that there was over 45,000 engagements for Bird Day Live. This success has helped to guide decisions for future WMBDs and including more virtual elements.
Suppose one of your objectives for your festivals is to build a constituency of support. In that case, you will also want to understand the participants’ experiences and any changes in opinions, perceptions, or willingness to take action to protect shorebirds. Zoom online meeting tools allow for live polls, where participants can be asked a few brief questions throughout a presentation. A more detailed (but still simple!) survey can be created and sent directly to festival participants or share on social media. Survey tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey are useful this.
“When the world changed, we quickly adapted our 30th anniversary celebration for the Copper River Delta Shorebird Festival to go virtual. Nothing replaces the in-person experiences of flocks with 100,000 shorebirds, but the virtual activities were a great alternative and even engaged people who might never have been able to participate in the festival.” shared Erin Copper, Chugach National Forest, United States Forest Service, one of the coordinators of the festival. Like the Copper River Delta Shorebird Festival coordinators, we all look forward to returning to events and field trips where we can share the experience of 100,000 shorebirds in migration. But until then, we adapt and continue to connect our communities with shorebirds and conservation with our creativity, and a lot of help from technology.
Please consider joining the WHSRN Executive Office’s quarterly Community Engagement Connection for more information on virtual festivals or other community engagement for conservation action. Email Laura Chamberlin to receive more information.
Cover Photo:Rufus, the Red Knot mascot of Asociación Ambiente Sur, at the 7th Annual Shorebird Festival . Photo: Asociación Ambiente Sur
