Lindisfarne Festival launches ‘make-or-break’ crowdfunding campaign for 2020 festival

Despite a well-attended and highly regarded event this summer, organisers have stated that the festival will only go ahead again in 2020 if a minimum of £85,000 (around 1,000 tickets) are sold during a one-month crowdfunding campaign which launched on Tuesday via the Crowdfunder platform.

Due to high competition for funding and ticket sales as well as increasing costs of putting on an outdoor event of this nature, organisers have stated they have no choice but to revert to crowdfunding - which proved highly successful for Lindisfarne Festival in October 2017, when £75,000 was successfully raised over the six-week campaign.

Festival founder Conleth Maenpaa said: “We’re so proud of how far Lindisfarne Festival has come over the last five years.

”This year’s event was truly spectacular from start to finish (definitely our best event by far!) and the feedback received has been really outstanding.

“It will be devastating if we have to pull the plug on things next year, but as an independent festival it’s almost impossible to put on a quality event without some significant capital from the outset, which is why going back down the crowdfunding route is our only option for 2020.”

The inaugural Lindisfarne Festival was completely self-funded by Conleth in 2015, with some support from Arts Council England and local business sponsors such as The Alnwick Brewery contributing towards costs in recent years.

In 2017 and 2018, financial support from Arts Council England’s former Grants for the Arts programme provided the independent festival with a welcome cash injection to cover a small percentage of the escalating event production and artist costs, but despite multiple applications made throughout the year, festival organisers were unfortunately unsuccessful in obtaining grant funding to support the event in 2019.

In the last four years, the festival has seen its audience more than double to almost 5,000.