If you’re looking for festival booth entertainment ideas like face painting, balloon twisting, caricatures, or other fun art forms, we’d love to work with you!
Kaleidoscope is New England’s #1 creative event entertainment company, and since 2013 we have worked dozens and dozens of festivals in CT, MA, RI, NH, VT, and ME.
Here are our 4 biggest festival booth entertainment tips, plus our top 5 favorite artistic entertainment ideas!
4 Big Festival Booth Entertainment Tips
1. Define Your Goals
Why are you getting entertainment?
To get people to visit your event? To raise awareness for your specific brand in a large event? To keep kids entertained?
Knowing why you want entertainment will help you use your budget to achieve your goal.
2. Use Entertainment for Marketing, Not Pay-Per-Face
Advertising “free face painting” or “meet [a character]” will get you closer to virtually any goal than pay-per-face options, where an entertainment company charges guests per design.
In our years in the event entertainment industry, we’ve found that the largest festivals and busiest booths we see do two things:
- they lead with free face painting (or whatever entertainment they choose) in their marketing
- and they invest in making sure that marketing is seen.
Whether you’re trying to drive booth traffic at your event or trying to boost numbers, leading with “free family entertainment” is going to drive more people to your goal.
Additionally, reputable entertainers–who can paint quickly, handle huge lines, and create good guest experiences–cannot gamble on your events’ outcome if your event is competing with other events that are offering free family entertainment. Volunteers or hobbyists may be open to a “pay per face” gamble, but they are also typically unprepared for the volume that they’ll need to handle at your event.
Kaleidoscope does not currently offer a pay-per-face payment structure for clients because we cannot compromise on our ethical labor practices and know that this leads to overall worse event outcome.
3. Keep Designs Simple to Save Your Organization Money
Instead of full face painting, consider using our unique speedy face paint menus.
Instead of color caricatures with full bodies, consider black-and-white busts.
In our experience of over 10,000 events, “free entertainment” offered to the public is almost always more popular than an event organizer believes it will be. If your budget is limited, keeping designs simple-but-impressive will save you money.
But even still….
4. Be Prepared for a Line Line!
Even if you hire enough entertainers and limit the designs to simple options, we almost always find that open events have higher foot traffic than you anticipate!
Depending on your event, however, you can leverage a line:
- If you want event entertainment to bring people to your booth, you can have your sales or outreach team approach waiting families in line to educate them about your offerings.
- If you have a choice, you can put your entertainment (and line) near other activations, high points of interest, or the farthest area from your exit to steer guests where you want them to go in your event.
Still, there are a few things you need to prepare for.
- Be mindful of what direction your line will go in. Roping off a line so it doesn’t interfere with other booths or traffic can help your event function smoothly.
- Guests will be coming up for free entertainment up until the very last second of the event. If you can’t afford free entertainment for your whole event, our suggestion is to start the entertainment later in the day and go to the end (verses starting on time and ending early).
- Likewise, if artists have to stop the line 15min before the end of the event to finish everyone before the event closes, it’s helpful for your staff or volunteers to help artists explain that the event has to be finished at a certain time.
5 Favorite Festival Booth Entertainment Ideas
1. Face Painting
Recommendation for festivals: Keep offerings fast-but-impressive with our unique speedy face menu.
Guests entertained per hour: 10-12 full faces or 20-25 speedy faces per hour per artist.
Great for: Summer festivals and family-centered events.
Not great for: Events with water activation or bounce houses.
Set up required: 1 table and 2 chairs in the shade. (We cannot provide these for insurance reasons.)
2. Airbrush Tattoos
Recommendation for festivals: Make sure you check with your site coordinator to confirm that our airbrush artists will have access to electricity before booking. Otherwise, we can switch to another type of temporary tattoo ahead of time, although airbrush are the fastest and most popular for festivals and fairs!
Guests entertained per hour: Up to 30 per hour per artist.
Great for: All-ages events or festivals / fairs focusing on adults.
Not great for: Events focusing on small children (the airbrush machine can look scary to kids under 4).
Set up required: 1 table and 2 chairs ⚡within 10′ of a 3 prong outlet⚡ in the shade. (We cannot provide these for insurance reasons.)
3. Caricatures
Recommendation for festivals: Keep things black and white with busts-only. Full color and bodies slow down the line more than you’d expect!
Guests entertained per hour: 6-10 per hour per artist.
Great for: All-ages family events or fairs / festivals focusing on adults.
Not great for: Events focusing on children under 10 who will get bored staring at a stranger and smiling without any stimulation.
Set up required: 1 table and 3 chairs in the shade. (We cannot provide these for insurance reasons.)
4. Tie Dye Station
Recommendation for festivals: Come prepared with branded apparel that is 100% cotton and white! Our spray tie-dye is low mess.
Guests entertained per hour: Around 24 per hour per artist.
Great for: Distributing branded apparel and raising brand awareness, or an activity for all ages (even little ones can work our spray tie-dye!)
Not great for: Events where you don’t need or want give-away swag.
Set up required: 1 6-8′ long table and 1 chair in the shade. (We cannot provide these for insurance reasons.)
5. Mascot Meet and Greet
Recommendation for festivals: Make sure your mascot is in the shade for their safety! Read more here.
Guests entertained per hour: Up to 25 families per hour (so, if each family has 2 kids, 50 kids per hour).
Great for: Family-focused events where you want to move a line quickly.
Not great for: Adult-focused events.
Set up required: An area in designated shade (such as a tent or indoor area), a designated space for the mascot actor to take breaks and change away from children, plus a staff member or volunteer to stay with the mascot. (If you are unable to provide a handler, we can also send additional staff.)
Book Your Festival Booth Entertainment
If you want festival or fair booth ideas, speak to our office today!
Categories: Party Planning Help