Jungle Love returns April 28 - April 30 (long weekend) in Jimna
Raymond here, Jungle Love Festival Director. Jungle Love returns April 28 - April 30 (long weekend) in Jimna. Tickets go on sale next week on November 1st, but there’s more to it this time round. Please read on:
We need to have an open and honest chat about where we're at as a festival, as we're going to need your help to keep it going strong.
We've all personally had our fair share of trials and tribulations over the last few years, navigating through a pandemic and the current cost of living crisis that we’re all feeling. I know it, you know it, we all know it; we've all been dealing with it in our own ways as best as we can. Last year, Jungle Love Festival 2021, was a dream run, from tickets selling out on the first day to the perfect weather. The universe was particularly kind to us as we were finding our feet again after our cancellation in 2020.
We were then incredibly fortunate to receive a total of $280,000 in grant funding for our 2022 event which enabled us to pay all of our artists better than we've ever been able to.
Things should be going better than ever for us.
But unfortunately, the costs of postponing an event due to site flooding earlier in the year, site changes (including building a brand new festival site from scratch in 4 months), supplier costs increasing across the board between 20 - 50% (while our ticket prices remained the same), and our lowest ticket sales in seven years, we've found ourselves in a world of hurt financially, even with all of the support we had this year.
We usually sell around 1800 tickets each year and have done so since 2017. Our breakeven point was 1500 tickets. We sold 1150 tickets this year. And it's not just us. It’s a trend happening across the events industry, with tours and concerts cancelling when they find they’re not viable due to a combination of lower than usual ticket sales and soaring costs.
With the rising cost of living causing grief for everyone, we know from first hand feedback that a lot of people simply can't afford to go to festivals at this time as they've got to prioritise food, rent, bills etc.
For this reason, we are making a few changes to next year's event. We are reducing the capacity and are planning a smaller festival that we are sure we can achieve instead of aiming high and hoping that we get enough ticket sales by event day.
Even though costs are continually increasing, we are making our tickets cheaper for this event only so that it is hopefully more affordable.
Our first release tickets are only $235. Tickets go on sale this Tuesday November 1st.
We will be releasing all ticket tiers at once. If you can afford the higher ticket price, we ask that you please consider paying for the more expensive ticket and leave the cheaper ones for others that might be more in need. That is of course at your discretion, we will just be appreciative that you bought a ticket.
To make the whole thing work though, we're going to need your help. If you believe Jungle Love to be a special gathering worth fighting for and you want it to continue to thrive then we ask you to please consider buying a ticket super early or consider making a donation to the festival.
For donations, we have set up a GoFundMe
We never have any funds in reserve to weather a storm if we don’t hit our targets. Each year we seem to sell enough tickets to just scrape through, or if we do make a surplus it’s just enough to get the ball rolling on the next event. It’s a labour of love for all that work on the festival and we're all happy to give that labour, but it’s impossible for us to operate by hoping that people will buy their tickets in the final months and weeks before the festival kicks off.
We need to know early on what the scope is of what we're going to be able to deliver and that people are going to buy tickets and show up. By buying a ticket early, you are investing in us to deliver the best possible festival experience.
For some perspective, if everyone bought their ticket on the day they went on sale we’d have a great deal of certainty around the scope of the experience we’d be able to craft for you all. If everyone left buying a ticket until the last few days before the event, we as organisers wouldn’t know if we have the right number of toilets, showers, food vendors, stages, security or medical staff, or if we’d be able to get more in a short space of time if we needed to.
If you love this festival, and the whole community and vibe we’ve been cultivating together, we need you to be our ambassadors and spruik us to your friends and get them to buy tickets too.
We spend plenty of money on marketing, but our best marketers are you. You all bring the best kind of people with you each and every year which at the core of it is what makes Jungle Love such an otherworldly vibe every time. It’s something that’s really important to us and we’ve worked so hard to retain over the past eight years.
Last year we turned Jungle Love into a not-for-profit. This year it has become a registered charity. We did this for a few reasons and now is probably the best time to explain why we did it. Firstly because we recognised the only way Jungle Love can be the utopia that it is is from the collective contribution of everyone involved. While we need lots of funds to operate and cover unavoidable costs, that money doesn’t go far at all. To make up the difference of what we can’t afford to do, everyone working across the festival chips in some or a hell of a lot of their time. Should the scales ever be tipped in our favour and we find ourselves one year with a stack of profit, it would be because of everyone’s contributions, and therefore those funds should go back into the festival to support the community that supports the festival.
Once I realised this was the only way Jungle Love could exist, it was a revelation.
I believed in this moment that as long as we retained the goodwill of the community, Jungle Love could always find a way to live on even through adversity. I believed that by being a not-for-profit, the community would see the true nature of the festival, and we’d retain the goodwill, and therefore Jungle Love would be able to continue on. So that’s the first reason for this change in structure.
The other main reason for becoming a not-for-profit is because I knew we’d find ourselves in this situation eventually. I’ve seen many festivals come and go over my lifetime. Many have their heyday and then one year the winds change, or the actual weather changes, and that’s it, they're out of funds and unable to recover. I knew what I’d be getting myself into right from the start. I believed that if/when we found ourselves in a situation like the one we’re in now that the only way forward would be for the community to help Jungle Love back on its feet. So going not-for-profit was about providing reassurance that Jungle Love exists for the experiences, connections, joy, and the meaning that it brings to peoples’ lives. That stuff is priceless. I felt that if people understood that, they would fight for the survival of Jungle Love like it’s their own. After all, it takes a village to raise a child.
I know that there are many of you that love Jungle Love more than almost anything else in the world and it’s been one of the highlights of your lives. And so I’m putting my heart on the line here and asking you, the community that Jungle Love is created for, to please back us and please help the festival and help it get back on its feet. If not for yourself, then for others to enjoy and benefit from.
We’ll be sending out another email when tickets go on sale on Tuesday. Getting your tickets early will help us keep this train running for at least another year so please do so if you can.
Feedback from our 2022 event
We feel it’s important to address a few things after this year’s event.
We want to thank everyone that provided feedback in our post-event survey. We've listened and we’ve observed and we’re continually working to create the best festival experience.
A brand new site was always going to have its challenges. Mother nature dumping a bucket load of water on us amplified those challenges, naturally. The car parking on a slope that turned muddy was a fail, no two ways about it. Lesson learned. Sorry about that. We’re changing the site layout for the next one, and the whole top area of the festival site that had Dreamland (the circus tent), food stalls, Jambala, The Nursery, The Gallery etc will all be converted into flat camping space. No one will be parked on the slope. The festival will start from where Love Camp was held and the main stage will be up on the maze hill, so it'll be an even shorter distance to walk around the festival site, both between stages and to your camp.
As for the roads, massive improvements have already happened since with new roads created and the preexisting roads being filled with gravel and rolled, so even if we were so unlucky to have another wet event, you would still be able to get onto the road easily whenever you needed to leave the festival.
Thank you for your support of Jungle Love.
Much love,