New Partners to contribute to EU Project “FestivalFinder.eu (a)Live Now”
FestivalFinder.eu is an online search tool for audiences to discover all arts festivals, from music to theatre, streets arts to dance, literature, etc. in 45 countries in Europe near and far.
FestivalFinder.eu and its 2300 registered festivals today are embarking on a new partnership with the City of Bergen, Italiafestival, publiq, Summa Artium and EURACTIV Media Network. The EU supported project “FestivalFinder.eu (a)Live Now” brings together cities, tourism boards, press and academia under a shared objective: to bring local content on arts and arts festivals to the attention of audiences worldwide. “(a)Live” has the ambitious objective to create a centralised interaction channel between festivals and different stakeholders for all sorts of audiences to know what is going on in the festivals world European-wide thanks to the digital tool ‘FestivalFinder.eu’. It kicks off in October under the Creative Europe programme.
FestivalFinder.eu offers information about arts festivals across 45 countries, highlighting one of Europe’s most important assets, its variety of cultures, languages and art forms. It guides international audiences, festival lovers, festival makers, artists, travellers, academics, journalists, bloggers, policy makers, city developers and all stakeholders through the world of Europe’s diverse cultural space. It is rooted in and steered by the festivals’ community with the support of the European Union.
The European Festivals Association together with its partners will invest the next 2 years to develop FestivalFinder.eu so that art lovers have the chance to access even more up-to-date, insightful, complete information on the immense strength and powerful force that festivals bring to local life, community building and sustainable tourism.
The partners of this new cooperation model include:
- the European Festivals Association
- the City of Bergen (Norway)
- the national festivals association Italiafestival
- the research observatory of Summa Artium
- the Pan-European media group EURACTIV Media Network
- the digital platform for culture and leisure participation publiq
“Whether you are a festival lover, a festival maker, a traveller, a journalist, a policy maker… FestivalFinder.eu has something for you. We are glad to be able to work out examples of how cities and tourism officers can use and refer to this pan-European platform for arts festivals and bring its contents to the attention of arts lovers worldwide”, Kathrin Deventer, Secretary General of the European Festivals Association.
“Looking forward to develop this project together! Great potential, amazing partners.” Bart Becks, President and Chairman of EURACTIV Media Network.
Summary of the project
From October 2020 until July 2022, “FestivalFinder.eu (a)Live Now” will activate the digital tool FestivalFinder.eu with 6 partnering stakeholders from 6 different sectors: festivals, cities, national tourism boards, the press, academia and the technological world.
(a)Live sets a multi-sectorial stakeholder basis to transform FestivalFinder.eu as an interfaced dynamic portal for various targets to access and interact about festivals. By involving partners from different sectors as initiators, the project develops solutions for more audiences to be engaged in discovering artistic offers. It will increase access for audiences to the arts and information on festivals’ rich diversity in Europe and beyond. (a)Live has the ambition to turn these audiences into actors that bring the arts festivals to live.
The project will develop a new sustainable business model with all the arts festivals’ stakeholders by offering a European collaboration window to cities and national tourism boards, a contextualised digital platform for journalists to disseminate their content and a complete database of festivals to researchers.
(a)Live will provide various outputs: a unique, centralised, interfaced festivals portal in Europe; a new cities network investing into higher accessibility of festivals info; an increasing number of active festivals in a database for interaction with academics & policymakers; and a platform for press to disseminate content on arts.
The City of Bergen in Norway (on a local scale) and Italiafestival in Italy (on a national scale) will be the flagships. They will collaborate closely with EURACTIV Media Network, Summa Artium, publiq and EFA to experiment the various possibilities offered by the project. (a)Live will then follow up on several toolkits for the different actors to explain how to benefit from FestivalFinder.eu. Each toolkit will focus on a specific stakeholder to tell the story on how to promote festivals ‘state-of-the-art’ like European-wide and use FF.eu as reference.
FestivalFinder.eu countries
FestivalFinder.eu includes arts festivals from 45 countries:
- The EU member states:Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom (UK)
- The Creative Europe countries:Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Republic of Serbia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Tunisia, Armenia, Kosovo
- Other included countries:Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan
Initiated by the European Festivals Association, FestivalFinder.eu finds its roots in the European funded project Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe (EFFE) and was launched in October 2018. Today it assembles more than 2300 arts festivals offering more than 18 different art disciplines and is still growing every day.
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