The Event
The Edinburgh Climate Festival is a day-long celebration of climate action held in the city’s famous Meadows Park, drawing thousands of attendees every year. Full of music, creativity, and joy, it brings together climate initiatives of every size – from informal community groups to organizations with hundreds of staff – to connect, inspire, and showcase what’s happening across the city.
The Challenge
The festival is delivered by a core team of just five people, supported by volunteers. There was no capacity for complicated, counterintuitive planning systems. The team needed to fit 50 stallholders, marquees, and activity areas into a small section of the park, keep at least 30 meters of clearance from the tree line to respect the tree protection zone required by their event management plan, and coordinate contractors and stallholders arriving on a tight event-day schedule.
The Solution: One Live, To-Scale Plan
Flexible, visual site design. On OnePlan’s map-based canvas, the team built their site plan and changed it as many times as they needed as new information and vendor requirements emerged. Drag-and-drop, to-scale structure objects made it easy to visualize and decide where everything would go.
Accurate measurement for compliance. OnePlan’s measurement tools let the team check the distance from the tree line to the center of the festival – confirming the 30-meter tree protection zone – and calculate spacing between marquees, stalls, and activities. Those measurements translated directly into accurate ground markings laid out the day before the event.
A clear site plan to share with contractors. Each contractor could see the festival’s entry points and their designated spot before ever arriving on site, allowing a faster site build on the day of the event.
One tool instead of many. With an intuitive, user-friendly interface, the team replaced a patchwork of different tools with a single platform, saving significant time internally as requirements shifted and multiple stakeholders needed to be managed.
The Results
Faster, smoother build. Contractors received the plan in advance, so they knew their entry points and designated spots before arriving at 8:00 AM. All main structures were built and organized by 10:00am, two hours ahead of the midday start.
No event-day traffic jams. With structures in place early, arriving stallholders had the time and space to set up around them, avoiding simultaneous arrivals and congestion in the small site area.
Compliance, confirmed from the desk. Tree protection distances and site spacing were validated on the map, without the need for site visits.
Want to benefit from one live site map when planning your next festival like Edinburgh Climate Festival? Start planning your next event today in OnePlan or book a demo with one of our team.