If you are part of the team for your college festival, you often find yourself in a position where you are asking yourself questions like ‘Why I am even doing this shit?’ or ‘In what ways can this actually benefit me?’ or ‘Is this going to help me acquire some skills or get a job?’ The answers to these questions are not so simple. If done right, working in a college festival can act as a huge learning experience, not just for your professional career, but for your life. But looking at the data, not many people seem to have done it right. In fact, a majority of people who work for their college festival seem to do it for the primary purpose of ‘social bonding’. Now, there is absolutely no harm in that. But if that is the foremost reason for you being a part of the team, do not expect to get anything out of the experience apart from new friends and a bunch of parties. The way I see it, organizing a college festival is the closest thing to your professional career while you are still in college, also giving you a tremendous amount of freedom on what roles do you want to pick. I was a part of the team for Alcheringa, the cultural festival of IIT Guwahati and had a terrific time during the learning phase. I tried to put my hand into as many teams and things as I could to make the most of the opportunity, and it has taught me more than anything else while I was in college. Here is my take on the best practices that can be followed to make your festival a massive success. But, why do we even organize the festival? Before we start talking about the ‘how’, it’s important to understand the ‘why’. If you think of it, there are just 2 kinds of people for whom the festival is being organized – A. Team– Yes, the biggest reason for organizing a festival is ‘you’. The primary purpose of any college festival is to give their own students an exposure to the outside world and help you learn a wide variety of skills while you are still in college. No matter what artists or footfall you get, if you fail at providing a kickass learning experience to your own team, you have already failed. Make sure you push your team beyond their limits, amidst all the rush and drama. B. People– A much smaller reason for organizing the festival is your audience. Your footfall. Your followers. Your participants. Making sure that they get a top-notch experience during your festival should be the second most important thing after the team. Customer satisfaction and happiness are what drives any organization in the long run. Every single person that walks out of your fest should be telling every single friend of theirs as to how awesome their experience and your management were. 1. Make things a bit formal— one thing unique about college festivals is that there is a fresh team every year. It can either take the festival to new heights or completely fuck it up. It is hence important to make things more process-dependent than people-dependent. Amidst all the worst things, you need to make sure that you are constantly making long-term processes for everything so that the important things always get the attention they deserve. For example, (informally) telling one of your juniors to think about some social initiative for the festival might not work as efficiently as forming a dedicated team/group for social initiatives. Similarly, defining monthly targets, writing down your organizations’ values, making cheat-sheets for different things, having some office hours per month and organizing scheduled meetings with a meaningful agenda can all go a long way in giving a direction to your team’s hard work. A senior once told me, ‘If there existed a parallel world where the same team would be conducting the festival for 10 years straight, we would be witnessing a way better festival right now.’ Making things formal and documenting stuff is the only way you can decrease this knowledge gap, and make things easier for future teams. Try to keep the organization as transparent as you can, to build a great team culture. More importantly, learn from the mistakes of your previous teams — you won’t have enough time to make them all yourself. 2. Think from Zero— one of the most difficult things for any team to do is to refrain from blindly following the previous teams’ work and thinking from scratch. Organizing another boring festival that is only marginally different from your previous edition is of no use. You have to be bold enough to try new things and discard the previous unsuccessful ones. I have personally witnessed so many good ideas/events not being implemented only and only because they are new and the team (thinks that) they don’t have the bandwidth for it since most of their time is sucked in focusing on multiple bad ideas/events being blindly followed year after year. Have a review meeting at the end of every festival, where you analyze the success and failures, and accordingly scrap a few things, restructure the team and define fresh goals. Stop taking things too seriously. You have to unlock new and amazing events and initiatives, and set an example for every other college festival team in the country. Quality beats quantity, any day. Try to avoid getting into the trap of — more events, more participants, ‘more’ of everything. If you’re focusing on ‘quality’, you’ll be able to scale more efficiently with time, without compromising on customer experience. Get the small things right. And the only way to get small things right is to plan more. There’s nothing heroic in doing everything at the last minute. 3. Make room for your ‘round pegs’ — there are always these ‘few’ people on your team who like to put an extra effort and do amazing things. They are ones who not just complain, but also ‘change’ things. They try to make sure that every small thing is implemented in the best way possible. Often, this 10 % of the people are the ones who make happen 90% of the festival. And hence, a big performance metric for any festival should be — how many roadblocks can you remove for these round pegs so that they can do outstanding things. Most people learn it the hard way, but the culture and productivity (and not ‘size’) of your team play a huge role in governing your success. Try to keep the team as small and amazing as possible, since those ‘extra’ people bring more damage than you think and can bring down your entire team culture. Form a separate ‘coordinators’ team in the last month of the festival for all the extra burden that you think you’re going to have, rather than making these people a part of your main team. ‘Idealism is the starting point to greatness.’ 4. Don’t fuck with your inter-team coordination — there’s no point talking about what an amazing job your team did if the overall festival was a failure. If you are the guy who is making a registration portal/app, why not talk to the marketing guy and put a few sponsor logos/coupons/games on it? Or why not talk to the PR guy, and put in a system where they can send updates/mailers to the participants? Similarly, if you are the guy who is responsible for events, why not talk to the marketing team about the possibility of sponsor specific events? Try to avoid these ‘gaps’ between multiple teams, so that you can do things better, and make everybody win. So basically, whenever you are doing something for the festival, ask yourself the question — how can other teams benefit the most from this? Another hack is to form small alliances between teams for specific things so that they can work with each other more closely. For example, you can have a dedicated ‘customer experience’ team that comprises one each of a PR, events, design & marketing guy so that they can draw out the entire customer journey during the festival, and work towards making it better. Same goes for having an ‘artist happiness’ team or a ‘