Map your festival site: stages, services and everything in between

Ask ten people on a festival crew where the second first aid tent is and you'll get answers from three different versions of the site plan. One is a PDF from February, one is a photo of a whiteboard, and one is in the production manager's head. A site map everyone works from is one of the cheapest safety improvements a festival can make.

FestivalSpark keeps the map in your console, next to the lineup, vendors and sponsors of the festival it belongs to, and publishes it on your festival website for visitors. This guide covers what to put on it and how to keep it honest.

What belongs on the map

Start with everything a person on the grounds might need to find, or that your crew needs to reach quickly:

• Venues: every stage, including the small ones. The acoustic tent and the DJ platform count.
• Food and bars: food rows, individual trucks if they're spread out, bars and the beer garden.
• Restrooms: each block of portable toilets and any permanent restrooms on the site.
• First aid and water: first aid posts and every water refill point.
• Entrances: the main gate, accessible entrances, artist and crew entrances.
• Parking: public lots, accessible parking, vendor and crew parking.
• Nearby: hotels and restaurants your artists, crew or visitors will use, and other points of interest.

In FestivalSpark each of these is a location with a type, so the map can tell a stage from a restroom block at a glance.

Permanent places and this year's places

Some places are the same every year: the permanent amphitheatre, the park's restroom building, the partner hotel downtown. Others exist only for this festival: the pop-up second stage, twenty portable toilets along the east fence, an extra first aid tent for the heat.

Keep the two apart. Add permanent places once under Festival > Locations, and they're kept by your organization and reused every year. On each festival's Map tab, add the permanent places this year's festival uses, and create event-only locations for everything that's only there this time.

When next year's festival starts, you don't redraw the park. You add the permanent places, then rebuild only the temporary layer, which is the part that actually changes.

Placing pins where there's no address

A location with an address is placed on the map automatically. That works for the hotel and the restaurant, and not at all for "the grassy corner behind the second stage".

For anywhere on the grounds, drag the pin to the spot, or click the map to drop one. Once you've placed a pin by hand, FestivalSpark keeps it there; a later address lookup won't move it. That means the production manager can nudge the first aid tent twenty metres toward the main stage without worrying that an address edit will send it back to the park's front gate.

Stages are where the schedule meets the map

Only venues can host performances, and a performance's venue has to be on the event's map. It sounds strict, but it prevents a common mistake: scheduling a whole afternoon on a stage that was cut from the plan, or that exists in the running order under a different name than on the site plan. Put the stage on the map first, then schedule sets on it. The lineup guide covers performances in detail.

Lay it out for people, not for the drawing

A site map is a set of decisions about how people move. A few principles that hold at most outdoor festivals:

• Services follow crowds. The biggest crowd gathers in front of the main stage, so water and restrooms need to be close to it but not in its sightline or in the path people take between stages.
• Separate the flows. Keep food queues out of the walkways between stages. Keep vendor load-in routes and emergency access lanes clear of seating and activations.
• Mind the wind and the sound. Grills and generators go downwind of seating. Stages face away from each other and away from the nearest neighbours.
• Put first aid where crews can reach it. A first aid post needs vehicle access, not just a nice spot on the lawn.
• Water is not optional. On a hot day, refill points in every major area reduce first aid visits. Put more than you think you need on the map, then check they each have a water supply.

Use the map when placing vendors and sponsors

The map pays off when you place everyone else. Put food vendors near seating and water, craft vendors where people linger, and sponsor activations where the sponsor was promised they'd be. When you record an approved vendor's booth location, use names that match the map, so "Food Row B" means the same thing to the vendor coordinator and to the site crew. See the guides to vendors and sponsorships.

Walk it before you open

A week out, walk the real site with the map open on a phone. The console works in a mobile browser, so the person walking the site can check each pin against what's really there and note what needs moving. Check that every pin is where the thing actually is, and that nothing on the map was quietly cut from the plan.

On the day, the map is also where the answers to crew questions live: where's the nearest water to the second stage, which lot is vendor parking, where the accessible entrance is.

The same map is on your festival website's Map & Info page: an interactive map with a legend visitors can filter (stages, food, restrooms, first aid and more), and every location listed with a link to directions. Because visitors see it too, check event-only pins before the gates open. Add the practical answers, such as parking, re-entry and accessibility, to the page's FAQ.

For the full order of work, read how to plan a multi-stage festival.