An #EatDrinkFestivalFOUR Postmortem
Before we get into anything, we apologize about the traffic.
Following the mess at the gate last year, we took full control of security at Festival this year. Through our security company, we got a couple more police officers and got the Lagos Neighborhood Safety Corps (LNSC) on board. LNSC over LASTMA because that’s what we were advised, might have been bad advise in retrospect - we still don’t know.
It turns out our efforts were insufficient. While we had mapped out a flow of traffic for our event, we didn’t have any contingency plans in case other events occurred on the day. And occur, they did. We had to share Water Corporation with a wedding and a MultiChoice Nigeria event.
As for the elephant in the room: why not Eko Atlantic? Well, this one was beyond our control. During the year, another event took place at the venue and caused major property damage. As a result, Eko Atlantic closed its property to events from external parties like us. Just like that, the Festival was homeless again lol. If you have any location suggestions, please let us know.
If there’s anything we’ve learnt this year, it’s that there’ll never be a big enough location. The only thing we can do is manage the flow of traffic effectively. To do that, we probably need to start talking to Lagos State and whatnot. We saw a couple of complaints comparing us to GTBank and that’s when we realized the Festival isn’t just “Nosa & Folly” anymore. It has since moved past that, which is a good problem to have. With the Festival growing at this rate, we’ll need a proper team and additional professional support. We’ll sort that out this year.
Beyond the traffic, we had some big wins at the Festival this year. The stage was absolutely fantastic and it worked how we wanted it to work for the most part. The sound might have been dodgy at times, but for a first attempt, we think we captured what we wanted to achieve. In future Festivals, we’ll definitely expand the main stage and take some more risks.
On the vendors, although curated, it felt like there were a lot of the same things. 65 vendors is the most we’ve ever had at any of our events and we’re considering dropping that number to add a bit of novelty to each vendor. This might be insular thinking on our part so we’ll see if the results of the Festival survey agree with us. That said, we did have an Amala vendor this year.
A big thank you to the sponsors for supporting us. We couldn’t have done it without Stanbic IBTC, Maggi, Taxify, Nescafe and Skyy Vodka + American Honey. A bigger thank you to everyone that came out. We hope you guys had fun and, as always, we’d love your input so if you have any suggestions on how the Festival can be improved.
If you’d love to participate in the Festival, please fill the form on eatdrinkfestival.com. The Festival is back on December 26, 2018