How to Recruit Vendors for a Community Festival

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Jim Goettler with Expert Village and this is a video about how to produce a small community festival. In this segment, I am going to touch on vending. How to work with vendors and what they are all about. When you go to a festival, you will also often see vendors. You will see food vendors, non-food vendors, craft and arts and so on. As a producer of the event, you need to look at it also as one of your income producers. If you realize that each of those vendors might be paying say a $100 and if you have ten of those vendors that is a $1,000 that your festival has already to work with. How many you have will also depend upon your budget and your site and what you can fit in but you need to think in terms of food and non-food vendors being an intricate part of your event. Food vendors are a whole scene onto themselves because of the complications, health requirements, heating requirements and cooling requirements and the need for power that they bring into your festival. I recommend strongly that original core that we talked about a long time ago have one person who is going to be the coordinator for vending, ideally you will have a vendor coordinator and someone also to handle food who may be with food booth or may understand industry. It is a very specialized area and you can get yourself into all certain types of hassles if you don't do it right. I suggest you getting a vending coordinator. One for food and one for non-food vending and work with the vendors the best that they can. In the next segment we are going to talk about another money issue which is sponsorship. Stay with me. "