If you are hosting a big community event like a street fair or festival one way to get attendees involved and hold their interest is to have a participatory activity that engages all their senses.
Doing so can also provide many unique opportunities to incorporate branding, sponsorship and the soft sell while also improving on the event experience.
This article from the Event Manager blog has 15 examples of participatory events and one of the examples is a crafting activity. Crafting encourages attendees to get in touch with their creative side. And it can provide them with a souvenir and gives the opportunity to sit down and discuss your brand, product or services with them as they create.
The Headdress Workshop is an interactive art class where participants get to WEAR what they create. Plus it is a family friendly activity which is why companies like Airbnb and Walmart hired us to have a booth at community events they were sponsoring.
The photo above is at the Bayview LIVE festival in San Francisco and Airbnb hosted our booth.
And here we are setting the Walmart sponsored “Crown your Joy Booth” at The Black Joy Parade in Oakland.
At both events participants were able to make a free headdress in using faux flowers, foliage and other embellishments. A headdress does not require a high live of dexterity or fine motor skills. So children over 8 and differently-abled adults could make one with ease.
If they were too young to hold a hot glue gun their parents helped. But the children had input on their colors and design of the headdress
At the Black Joy Event, Walmart installed aninsta worthy photo booth for people to take photos after they made their headdress. This generated a lot of sharing on social media.
Normally the headdress classes we host in our facility are2 hours long. But when we do a community event we bring streamlined designs that people can make in 30 minutes. So we have 10-12 people at one time making a headdress on a drop in basis.
For the Black Joy Parade we brought some custom materials that appeal to this audience – cowrie shells and Afrocentric materials so they could make Wakanda style headdress if they didn’t want to make a traditional flower crown.
We would love to provide a crafting activity at your next event whether you are doing a small onsite for your employees or a large festival. Details of our capabilities are here
