What should a festival impact report for a council include?
Six sections, and the first one is the only one most people will read: a one-page summary carrying the three numbers that matter. Then attendance with the counting method attached, visitor origin, net additional spending in the area, the authority's own costs set honestly against the benefits, and finally social and environmental effects.
The document has a specific reader, and it helps to picture them. It is rarely the councillor who championed your event; it is an officer preparing a recommendation, who has to defend every figure to someone more sceptical than they are. Your job is to make that defence easy — which mostly means never making them ask "how do you know that?".
- Summary: one page, three headline numbers, an honest verdict on the edition.
- Attendance: how many, and exactly how you counted — scanned, ticketed or estimated.
- Origin: the share from outside the area, and how far outside.
- Net additional spending: what the area gained, after the deductions below.
- Cost to the authority: policing, cleansing, road closures, officer time. Put it in yourself.
- Social and environmental effects: participation, volunteering, waste, transport.
That fifth item is counter-intuitive and worth doing anyway. An organiser who volunteers the council's costs and still shows a positive net position reads as credible. One who omits them reads as someone hoping nobody checks.
What is additionality, and why does every council ask about it?
Additionality is the extent to which something happens as a result of an intervention that would not have occurred in its absence. It is the core question in UK public-sector appraisal — set out in the government's Additionality Guide and underpinning HM Treasury's Green Book — and it is the reason gross impact figures get marked down so heavily.
Four deductions stand between your gross number and the net one an officer can use. Learn the words, because using them yourself signals that you already know where the argument goes:
- Deadweight — outcomes that would have happened anyway, without your festival.
- Displacement — activity moved from elsewhere in the area rather than created. The pub that was full because the pub down the road was empty.
- Leakage — benefits that land outside the authority's boundary. The touring crew that sleeps two districts over.
- Substitution — a business simply swapping one activity or worker for another, with no net gain.
Applying these to yourself is not self-sabotage: it is the fastest way to be taken seriously. A report that says "gross visitor spend £1.4m; after deadweight and displacement, net additional £610,000, method below" is worth more to a council than one claiming £1.4m flat — because the first can be put in a committee paper and the second cannot. (Figures illustrative.)
How do you measure the economic impact of a festival?
The standard method is narrower than most organisers expect: survey a sample of attendees about what they spent, average it, scale it to the full event population, and add the organiser's own net spending inside the host economy. That produces direct economic impact. Everything beyond it — indirect and induced effects, multipliers — is modelling, and should be labelled as such.
In the UK the common reference is the eventIMPACTS toolkit, which is backed by government partners and covers economic, social, environmental and media impacts. Its methodology for direct economic impact is endorsed by the International Association of Event Hosts, and it deliberately favours methods that are cheap and practical rather than academically exhaustive. If your council names a framework, it is likely to be this one. If it names none, citing it anyway does you a favour: it moves the conversation from "do we believe you" to "is this the standard method", which is a much easier conversation.
The full method, including the direct, indirect and induced components and where each one stops being defensible, is in our pillar guide: how to measure an event's economic impact.
Never present a modelled figure and a counted figure in the same typeface without a label. Tickets scanned is a fact. Induced spending is an estimate with assumptions. A report that blurs the two invites a reader to distrust both.
Why visitor origin matters more than total attendance
Because residents mostly move money around inside the area, and visitors bring it in. That single distinction reframes what a "big" festival is.
A 20,000-capacity event with 15% out-of-area attendance and an 8,000-capacity one with 60% are not in the order you would guess once you strip out displacement — and the smaller one often makes the stronger case to an authority, because a larger share of what it generated is genuinely new to the district. If you have never measured origin, this is the first thing to fix: it is the number with the most leverage per unit of effort in the entire report.
Overnight stays are the multiplier on top. A visitor who stays two nights is worth several who drive home after the headline act, and accommodation is the spending category councils track most closely because it is the easiest to corroborate against their own tourism data.
- Share of attendance from outside the local authority area.
- Distance bands — neighbouring district, rest of region, rest of country, international.
- Overnight stays, and the split between paid accommodation and staying with friends.
- Repeat versus first-time attendance, which shows whether you are building an audience or renting one.
Where the numbers come from
Almost everything above already exists in systems you own: ticketing records, entry scans, and the postcodes you collected at the point of sale. The obstacle is never availability — it is that the data sits in three exports that disagree with each other, with duplicates across them and no way to compare this edition with the last.
Solco pulls ticketing in — a direct DICE connector, CSV from anything else, box office included — plus QR scans, deduplicates it into unique profiles, and builds the report as web and PDF. Each figure carries its confidence level: guaranteed by Solco when it comes from deduplicated official ticketing, external signal when it is indicative only, from the organiser when you declared it yourself. Estimates carry explicit, editable assumptions and a range rather than a single point, and where data is missing Solco says so instead of filling the gap.
That last property is the one that matters for this particular document. A council officer needs to see at a glance which numbers you counted and which you modelled — and a report that draws that line for them is a report they can forward without rewriting it. To see what it looks like against your last edition, book a demo.
Frequently asked questions
What should a festival impact report for a council include?
A one-page summary, attendance with the method used to count it, visitor origin, net additional visitor spending in the local area, the council's own costs set against it, and social and environmental effects. Every figure labelled as measured or estimated. The single most important number is the share of attendance that came from outside the area.
What is additionality in an event impact assessment?
Additionality is the extent to which something happens as a result of an intervention that would not have occurred otherwise. For a festival it means stripping out deadweight (spending that would have happened anyway), displacement (spending moved from elsewhere in the area rather than created), leakage (benefits landing outside the council's boundary) and substitution, to arrive at net additional impact.
How do you measure the economic impact of a festival?
The standard approach is to survey a sample of attendees on their spending, average it, and scale it up to the total event population, combined with the organiser's own net spending in the host economy. That gives direct economic impact. The eventIMPACTS toolkit sets out this method step by step and is the common reference in the UK.
Why does visitor origin matter more than total attendance?
Because local residents largely redistribute spending that would have stayed in the area anyway, while visitors from outside bring money that would not otherwise have arrived. A festival of 20,000 with 15% out-of-area visitors and one of 8,000 with 60% can produce very different net figures, and the second is often the stronger case.