Hosting an Outdoor Concert in a Park
Outdoor concerts are the perfect summer activity — what could be better than enjoying nature while spending time with friends and listening to great music?
Hosting a spectacular outdoor concert is as easy as following our seven steps below. It will involve a lot of planning, but when done correctly, the result is a fantastic experience that will be the talk of the town.
How to Organize an Outdoor Concert in a Park
There are many pieces that go into planning an outdoor concert. Whether you’re organizing a large concert with hundreds or even thousands of people, or whether you’re hosting a smaller scale event, these tips will help you navigate the intricacies of planning a concert!
1. Create a Budget
Before you start looking for bands, venues and other important components of a concert, you first need to determine your budget. This will in turn influence all the other decisions you make.
If you want to host a free concert, your budget will simply be the amount of money you’re willing to invest into the experience. In this case, you may consider asking for donations upon entry to the concert.
For those who don’t want to throw a free concert, determine how many people you hope will attend the concert and come up with a reasonable ticket price. If you’re not sure how many people your concert will draw, research past concerts in the area for a rough estimate. This will give you a basic idea of how much you can spend.
Whether you want to throw a free or ticketed concert, consider reaching out to local businesses for sponsorship. If there have been past concerts in your area, the businesses that helped sponsor them might be more receptive to sponsoring yours. Finding business sponsors can help boost your budget significantly.
2. Find a Band
Now that you have a budget, you can start the exciting process of finding a band! There are a number of considerations that go into choosing a band, which we’ll discuss below:
- Budget: While it might be great to throw a Taylor Swift concert for your community, getting such a high-profile star may not be possible with your budget.
- Audience: The band you choose will be dependent on who you want to attend to the event. If you want to attract people in their twenties, you might choose a very different band than if you want a concert for the whole family.
Number of bands: Many concerts have a featured band along with one or two other performers serving as openers or supporting acts. If you go this route, make sure the bands you choose are comfortable performing at the same event.
3. Reserve the Location
Once you’ve successfully locked in your performers, start looking for a location. Once again, this will involve several considerations:
- Budget: As always, your budget plays a large role in the decision. Big concert venues might be too expensive to rent, but a public park is often much cheaper.
- Expected crowd: Make sure to have enough space for the amount of people you expect will attend the concert. You’ll need a larger area for over 1,000 people, but most public parks can easily accommodate 100-200 guests.
- Amenities: The amenities offered at a given park could influence your location decision. Parks with restrooms, trash cans, water fountains and more will make it easier to host a concert than an undeveloped park.
Once you’ve determined the location, make a reservation plenty of time in advance! Be sure to check which permits you’ll need to throw the concert in the park.
4. Rent Equipment
After you have your band and location determined, you should be in a good spot to start thinking about what equipment you need. Be sure to reach out to the band for the specifics of what they will require, but there are generally four major elements to consider.
Stage
If the terrain permits, you might be able to get away without using a stage. However, for increased visibility of your performers and to prevent equipment from getting dirty, renting a stage makes the most sense.
Be sure your stage is large enough to give adequate space to every member of the band and their instruments, as well as the necessary sound and lighting equipment.
Power Generator
Lights, sound systems and everything else required for a concert can use a lot of power. If your outdoor venue doesn’t have any plug-ins available, you’ll have to bring your own generator.
Be sure to research how much power all of your equipment takes so you know how much wattage you’ll need for the show
Lights and Sound
For the best experience, you’ll need stage lights and a sound system to run the concert. While you can get away with only bringing a few lights — and potentially none at all, if the entire concert occurs during the day — be sure not to skimp on quality microphones and speakers. After all, the sound of the band is what the audience came for!
Screens
For larger concerts, you’ll want LED screens large enough to display the performance for those towards the back of the crowd. At FunFlicks, we provide industrial quality LED screens that you can rent out for your next concert. With crisp and clear projection quality, whether you’re indoors or outdoors, during the daytime or nighttime, our LED screens are exactly what you need for an amazing concert!
5. Organize Concert Necessities
Getting equipment is important, but you’ll need more than just a stage and a screen to throw a successful concert. If your event will go longer than two or three hours, you will need to consider snacks, restrooms and more.
If your park has restrooms, then your job is much easier. If not, you will have to rent port-a-potties for the event. Similarly, check to see if the park has trash cans — if not, be sure to bring your own, as trash cans will greatly prevent litter and make your cleanup easier.
This is also your chance to determine whether you want to sell snacks and drinks. You can bring in outside vendors to take the workload off yourself, though this will ultimately be decided by your budget.
6. Advertise the Concert
Advertising your concert is an important step in hosting a concert — people can only come if they know about the concert in advance! If you’re not sure how to advertise your concert, there are plenty of ways to get the word out:
- Posters: Putting up posters in public areas and sharing them around social media will do wonders for getting information about your concert out to the public. Be sure to include all the important details — location, ticket prices, band name, and date and time — to make sure you get as much turnout as possible.
- Sponsorships: If you were able to get businesses to sponsor the concert, they might be willing to help promote the concert, as well. After all, the success of the concert will only help them.
- Social media ads: Paying for advertising on social media will help reach people who might not ordinarily hear about your concert. This will also allow you to target the specific audience that you are aiming to attract.
Word of mouth: Don’t forget about asking your friends and family to spread the word! For a local event, word of mouth can help spread information even better than posters or social media.
7. Find Event Workers
Now that you have almost everything set up, you might be noticing that running this concert is a multi-person job. Depending on what you’ve planned for the concert, you might need people to take admission, direct traffic, work food stands, run the sound system, help with crowd control, provide security, assist with setup and teardown and more.
For some events, you might be able to contact local volunteer organizations, or rope in your friends and family, to provide help in exchange for seeing the concert for free. However, if this doesn’t work out or if the event is larger, you’ll need to make room in your budget to hire personnel to assist with the concert.
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