Building Year-Round Community Through Annual Festivals

Why would an organization whose focus is to produce and present an annual festival choose to put the time, money, staff, and other resources into building and sustaining year-round community formation around their festival? Increasingly producers of annual festivals are approaching the quandary of trying to identify what they can do to help build year-round connections with participants, both between the event organization and the participant, and between the participants themselves.  Encouraging and supporting the development of year round community formation around annual festival events can extend the period of consumer interest and excitement.  Formation and support of year-round community can help to maintain participant engagement, bolster information sharing and gathering, and add active value to the participant experience.  This study sets out to identify some of the sources and structures for this community formation, and to begin forming a framework that might be applicable and of use to organizations seeking to develop or support year-round community formation.