
Business Spotlight: Hay Festival
Hay Festival is a charity providing global festivals of stories, ideas, and new possibilities. Based in the booktown of Hay-on-Wye, Wales, Hay Festival brings together diverse voices to listen, talk, debate and create, tackling some of the biggest political, social and environmental challenges of our time.
Through one-of-a-kind festivals, in unique locations around the world – plus forums, digital platforms and learning programmes – Hay Festival Global celebrates and inspires different views, perspectives, and points of view.
Hay Festival is GlobalWelsh’s Charity Partner of the Year for 2024. We caught up with Julie Finch, CEO at Hay Festival, to chat about their recent rebrand, refocus and the importance of Wales to this globally iconic organisation…
I think a lot of us think we know Hay Festival but recently you’ve been through some major changes, a global rebrand and a move to charitable status, tell us about this…
Hay Festival has been around for 36 years. In February 2022, the board came to the conclusion that the best way forward for the festival was to become a full charity rather than two organisations as we were before. In addition to it making operational sense, one of the reasons was to ensure that the public understood our work, our value and why we exist.
Being a charity adds a sense of rigour and transparency to an organisation which we needed. Moving to a charity is quite a big thing to do for an organisation, structurally, the governance but also in terms of defining the strategy being relevant to our society. I think often charities are misunderstood because they are still businesses but they have a strong sense of social purpose and social responsibility.
This transition has required a lot of reflection to really delve into why we're here, what we do and communicate our work and values to our audiences around the world. We realised that 90% of people didn't know we worked internationally. And we toyed with a number of words and phrases to describe us and strongly felt that ‘global’ was appropriate not only because our festivals span many different places, but actually that our ideas and audience cover the whole world. That's central to the proposition behind our rebrand as ‘Hay Festival Global’; our roots are in rural Wales but we, as an organisation, spin out around the world.
Tell us about what Hay Festival Global means?
Global is fitting to us, our focus and our activities. We started out as a literary festival but we found that we were far far more than this, we are a vehicle for ideas, for knowledge and for creativity and we do this on a global scale, moving between local and global in all our Festival editions.
Central to all of this we see our work as being a beacon of hope for all our creative imaginations and a better future. Hope is intrinsic in all that we do within our content. We don't just talk about problems of the world, we explore the solutions. We empower people to see the world differently and live in their worlds differently. And we do that through the medium of literature, arts and ideas.
On a practical level, how is Hay Festival inspiring ideas, knowledge and creativity?
Essentially, we run festivals and bring creative minds together. We have 13 festivals across the world in total this year; in the US, Latin America and in Europe. We've also taken writers from Ukraine into Hong Kong and India. We've also been to Nairobi as part of a partnership project. So we're spanning the world in different ways through our own work and through partnerships.
We’re continuing to build something world-class and spectacular. Looking at the Spring festival that took place in May, for example, our footfall increased by 7% and we had the same visitor capacity as we did pre-COVID and we hosted a record 650 events.
It’s phenomenally important to have the festival to create that impact. And then you multiply that across the world. So this is happening in different places across the world, drawing in local people to work and volunteer but also promoting that area. Selling the space and developing the impact economically in each of those areas. So the social, economic and environmental impact is a critical part of what we do.
It’s a lot of hard work and requires a lot of subsidy to ensure the festival is accessible to all but this is part of our charitable activity. Being accessible to everyone from all backgrounds is so important to us and is at the heart of everything we do at Hay Festival. From site management and ticket pricing to promotional activity and content. All our content is available online for people to watch/listen to at any time.
How important is being Welsh to you as an organisation?
Our origins are in Wales, our flagship Festival is in Hay-on-Wye, it’s in our DNA. We're very proud of our roots in Wales, we bring some of the world’s leading writers, thinkers and creatives to this small, beautiful town in mid-Wales and we create magic there.
Ideas are originating in Wales but then it spins out from Wales across the world. And I think that is something that we all share. Because Wales has a lot to offer the world.
We also work really closely with local suppliers for food and drinks and have exhibition space for Welsh businesses. We also work closely with cultural partners in Wales on the festival and look forward to developing these partnerships.
How can the diaspora and Wales support the Festival?
What's really important is that people understand that Hay Festival is a national project for Wales and also a really important project for the UK. We want to amplify Wales as the source at the beginning, fostering the sense of pride around it. And we want everyone to have a piece of that and understand what it is, whether it's online or attending a festival in person.
And then in terms of Wales and in the world. Increasingly, soft power in other countries is recognised as important. We are there to promote the soft power of Wales and the UK. So any way in which the diaspora can support that or be part of it, or attend festivals or want to be part of any of the international editions, we'd love to hear more from those people. I think that sense of pride is really important. And whether you live in Wales or not, if you're from Wales, you live somewhere else in the world. As we move forward with our strategy, we'll be consulting with key organisations across Wales, about the future of the festival at large. So we will be reaching out to various organisations and people to have those conversations as we evolve the charity.
What does the future look like for Hay Festival?
It’s a pivotal moment for us as we deal with a changing external environment in the world of arts, global political debate and identity politics. We are recruiting a new Chair and working on our five year strategy, building our long-term vision and honing our value proposition. We will continue to build on our current festival offering whilst exploring new development opportunities. We will continue to collaborate with partners and organisations that want to support the festival both in Wales and internationally, where reciprocity is key.
In the immediate future, we have a range of events coming up such as Lviv BookForum in October. Then, in November, we have Hay Festival Arequipa and the Hay Festival Winter Weekend in Hay at the end of the month. We’ll be welcoming along the likes of Matt Lucas, Hamza Yassin, Louise Minchin and Nigel Owens this year. Hay Festival Winter Weekend is turning 25 this year, which is something we are immensely proud of!
Together with Welsh Water GlobalWelsh is hosting an event at Hay Festival Winter Weekend on Sunday 1st December at 11:30am. Find out more about 'Julia Gillard and Sarah Louisa Birchley - People and Place: Wales and the Welsh diaspora' and buy tickets here >>
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