Festival activities do more than fill space; they drive event engagement, shape the attendee experience, and create tangible value for sponsors. The most effective festival activities are intentionally designed to spark participation, encourage sharing, and deliver measurable outcomes that matter to partners.
Today’s festival sponsorships are blending sustainability initiatives, immersive photo moments and wellness-focused spaces to meet rising attendee expectations while delivering stronger sponsor ROI. When planned strategically, a sponsorship activation can become a high-performing engagement tool.
Before you dive in, if you are interested in festival sponsorship, check out these titles in our “sponsorship for festivals” series:
- How to Plan a Festival the Complete Guide to Starting Growing and Perfecting Your Festival
- Festival Activations to Make Your Next Event Amazing
- How to Promote a Festival: Event Branding, Marketing, and Social Media
- Sponsorship for Festivals: What You Need to Know for Your Event to Be a Hit
- What Companies That Sponsor Festivals Are Looking for in a Partnership
Whether you’re hosting a major music festival, a smaller community festival, or any other type of event in between, no festival is complete without activities. What kind of activities should you plan to incorporate into your festival?
Trend-Oriented Enhancements
Festival activities are evolving alongside attendee behaviour and sponsor expectations. These high-level trends are shaping how modern events design engagement while increasing visibility and data capture for partners.
Sustainability-Led Experiences
Eco-friendly activations such as refill stations, recycling challenges, and upcycled art installations align with conscious consumer values while providing sponsors with a meaningful platform to demonstrate impact.
Immersive & Interactive Tech
AR scavenger hunts, interactive displays, and enhanced photo experiences turn passive attendees into active participants, extending engagement well beyond the festival footprint.
Smart, Digital-First Engagement
QR-driven interactions, app-based participation, and wearable check-ins make activities easier to track, scale, and measure using real festival metrics.
Wellness & Comfort Spaces
Cooling lounges, hydration zones, and sensory-friendly areas improve dwell time and attendee satisfaction, while offering high-value sponsorship inventory.
Creator & Content Culture
Social-first design, influencer-friendly layouts, and built-in UGC prompts help festivals generate organic reach that sponsors can quantify and report.
Together, these trends increase engagement depth while giving sponsors more precise performance data.
Here are 7 activities every festival needs:
- Contests
- Competitions
- Shopping
- Eating/drinking
- Games
- Lounging
- Photo areas
If you’re wondering which of these activities would slot nicely into your festival, then this is the guide for you. Ahead, I’ll go through each of the 7 activities above and explain their importance in festivals. You’ll also learn how to plan and measure these activities, so check it out!
7 Activities to Have at Every Festival
1. Contests & Giveaways
The Purpose: Why host a contest or giveaway during your festival?
That answer is simple. People always have and always will love free stuff.
Contests are a perfect opportunity to loop in your sponsors. They can provide the prize and then receive all the contact information when your audience enters their submission forms.
Your sponsor collects new sign-ups, people could win a car, and everyone is happy.
Example: Modern festival contests can allow for easy participation that extends beyond paper ballots.
- Digital entries
- QR-code giveaways
- App-based challenges
- AR scavenger hunts
How to Plan: Before you can decide on what kind of giveaway or contest you’ll do, you need to know your festival audience.
Depending on how diverse that audience is, you might decide to have several contests, such as those for the kids and then another contest for adults.
Next, you need to choose the prize as well as who will provide the prize. No matter who’s ponying up for the prize, it should be valuable.
A car is a foolproof prize, but it’s expensive. Lower-cost prizes that you know appeal to an audience’s interests could be just as exciting to win as a car.
Make sure to promote your contest on social media, on your website, and in your festival app if you have one. Present the contest before your festival and build up hype.
How to Measure: You can determine whether your contest was successful based on how many entries it received.
- Entries submitted
- QR scans
- Leads captured
- Completion rates
If you do another contest or giveaway next year, you can compare the number of entries for that year versus the first year and then tweak future contest ideas from there.
2. Competitions
The Purpose: Even in a chill setting like a festival, people love to know who among them is the best. Thus, they’ll be naturally drawn to a competition that tests their mettle.
A competition can encompass nearly anything and everything depending on your festival genre.
You could host a sports contest, an eating competition, an arm-wrestling contest, a dance-off, an art competition, or even a video game tournament.
The possibilities are practically endless!
Example: Festivals are the perfect areas to attract spectators and participants alike.
- Creator challenges
- Community art battles
- Gaming stations
- Mini eSports-style competitions
How to Plan: As you did when determining what kinds of festival contests you want to host, you need to dig through your segmented audience data when planning for a competition.
Based on your audience’s age, interests, and activity levels, what kind of competition would appeal to them?
More than it just being appealing, what kind of competition would make an audience member want to say, “yes! I’m going to join in on that?”
If yours is a large festival on a sprawling event space, then I would recommend trying out several types of competitions all at once.
Space out each competition so it’s in a different area from the last, and maybe host them at different times so that if people want to spectate each one, they can.
A competition doesn’t always need a prize. Sometimes it’s just the doing of it that’s satisfying enough.
That said, for those festival goers who are on the fence about whether they want to join in, prize money or another fabulous reward ought to get them off the fence rather quickly.
How to Measure: As was the case for measuring contest success, you can gauge how successful your competition was by how many people participated.
- Participation rate
- Audience size
- Dwell time
- Repeat engagement
App data might be able to determine who was a bystander at the competition, but you’d need sophisticated app software for that sort of thing.
3. Merch & Shopping
The Purpose: Another must-have activity at your festival is shopping.
Even if your event ticket costs a lot of money, people are still ready to throw down more of their hard-earned cash on all sorts of shopping that your event offers.
Whether it’s a festival t-shirt, exclusive merch from their favorite bands or artists, or other trinkets, festival goers will want it.
At the very least, they have a fun souvenir to remember the day by. At most, they now own limited-edition merch like a band festival poster or a unique piece of art. This becomes a treasured keepsake.
Of course, some people will sell the exclusive item they bought on sites like eBay for three or four times the value, but those kinds of situations can’t be helped.
Example: Encourage impulse buys and brand alignment without overwhelming attendees.
- Sustainable merchandise
- Limited-edition drops
- Cashless purchasing experiences
How to Plan: You want to make it easy for festival goers to spend their cash.
Your event app should detail where all the merch stands will be on the festival grounds.
If you don’t have an app, then you should print maps all over the site of the festival so people can find the merch stand.
All merch stands should be clearly labeled. Have enough merch stands so that no matter where on the grounds your festival attendees are, they can buy what they’re looking for.
Hire enough staff to man merch stands and anticipate that at certain times (like right after the gates open and before the festival ends), the merch stands can get incredibly busy.
Your festival app might allow users to link their credit or debit card or even PayPal so they can utilize cashless payments.
At the very least, please have plenty of cash readers. When you force your audience to go to an ATM to take out cash, you can make shopping so inconvenient that some people will decide not to do it.
Plus, with thousands and thousands of people around such as at a large music festival, the ATMs can quickly run out of cash!
How to Measure: Tracking merch sales will tell you how well you did in this department.
- Revenue per attendee
- Conversion rate
- Top-selling items
You can track whether certain types of merch outsold others. For your next festival, you’ll want more of that merch at your stands.
4. Food & Beverage Experiences
The Purpose: People need to eat and drink, and when they’re spending 12 or 16 hours at your festival (or even several days if your festival has overnight lodging), then they’re going to expect you to provide them with both food and drinks.
Example: Elevate food from a necessity to a destination, often anchored by sponsor integrations.
- Curated local vendors
- Diverse menus
- Zero-waste initiatives
How to Plan: Your festival needs a variety of food and drink options that appeal to festival goers of all ages and diets.
Decide whether you want to serve alcohol, and if you do, then you’ll likely need a permit.
Next, plan the types of cuisine you want to offer at the festival and how you’ll obtain these foods. Is it better to hire food vendors or food trucks? More than likely, your event will have a combination of both.
Based on projected attendance, calculate how many food vendors and food trucks you’ll need. You don’t want so many that some vendors don’t make a dime, but having too few means you’ll have hungry, angry festival goers.
Finally, you have to decide where on the festival grounds the food options will be installed.
As was the case with shopping vendors, you want food options spread out evenly across the festival grounds so your attendees can always grab a bite to eat or something to drink no matter where they are onsite.
How to Measure: When your festival wraps up, you can calculate the earnings per vendor or food truck.
- Vendor sales
- Average order value
- Peak traffic times
This will be a good litmus test to determine which types of cuisine were the most popular. Make sure you try to secure a recurring deal with that vendor or food truck for next year’s fest!
5. Games & Play Zones
The Purpose: Whether it’s a music festival or an art festival, there will be what amounts to hours of downtime before the next act starts. Games are a great opportunity to keep people engaged and active during the festival.
A game can encompass nearly anything you can think of (and that your budget allows for, of course). You can have basketball hoops, the aforementioned video game arcade idea, foosball tables, whatever suits your festival.
Example: Create high-energy hubs that keep attendees engaged between main-stage moments.
- Interactive screens
- Mobile-based games
- Simple physical challenges
How to Plan: Budgeting is your first order of business. With contests and competitions already planned for, you might not have a huge games budget for your festival.
That’s okay. You’re only trying to provide festival goers with entertainment between sets, so it doesn’t have to be too extravagant, especially not in your first year.
As was the case before, when planning games, allow your audience data to be your guide. You want to select activities that will be enjoyable for them.
How to Measure: Measuring who plays which games can be challenging.
- Festival badges or RFID bracelets to track how many people entered the games zone
- Dwell time
- Repeat participation
- Queue length
6. Lounge & Recharge Spaces
The Purpose: Chilling out in the hot sun for hours standing around and rocking out to one’s favorite songs is going to leave any festival goer exhausted.
Providing areas where they can lounge will allow your festival goers to have some pep in their step even once the sun goes down and the main event is on.
Example: Quiet zones improve comfort while offering sponsors longer, more meaningful exposure.
- Wellness lounges
- Shade structures
- Charging hubs
How to Plan: Decide what a lounge area at your festival will look like. Will it be outdoors or indoors?
What kind of amenities will you offer? You might provide comfy seating such as plush couches and chairs.
You could add a phone charging station so that attendees who have been snapping lots of photos and taking plenty of videos can recharge their dying phones.
An air-conditioned cooling zone is a great idea, as is a refreshment area, especially if your festival is in a warm region or during the summer.
How to Measure: As with hosting games at your event, it’s hard to determine how popular your lounge zone is unless you require access via an RFID wristband or event app.
- Foot traffic
- Tap-ins
- Average time spent
7. Photo & Social Share Areas
The Purpose: Last but not least, a great activity to have at your festival is a photo zone…or 20.
It’s no secret that people love to snap, snap, snap away on their smartphones. Besides your aesthetically pleasing festival grounds, give festival goers something to photograph by providing photo booths, appealing backdrops, and other photo areas that are perfect for the ‘Gram.
Example: Sharing event photos online increases visibility and provides valuable exposure.
- Immersive backdrops
- Branded installations
- 360° booths
- AI-enhanced photo moments fuel social sharing and post-event visibility.
How to Plan: As with everything else involving your festival, you’ll have to budget for photo zones or photo walls.
Take a tour of your festival grounds to determine where the most optimal place for photo zones will be. You want areas that aren’t in the thick of things but aren’t too far away from the action or no one will want to take photos.
How to Measure: Assess the success of photo areas using these methods.
How to Measure Activity Success
Follow a simple framework to evaluate the ROI of festival activities across engagement, sponsor value, and revenue impact:
- Engagement: participation rates, dwell time, footfall
- Sponsor Value: leads collected, scans, UGC generated
- Monetization: merch sales, F&B performance
- Digital Interaction: app actions, social metrics, AR usage
This approach keeps festival metrics consistent and sponsor reporting clear.
Conclusion
The most effective festival activities are intentionally designed to balance creativity with measurable outcomes. When engagement, comfort, and data collection work together, festivals deliver stronger attendee experiences and clearer value for sponsors.
Thoughtful planning turns activities into strategic assets, not just entertainment.
