An airline partner like Virgin Australia seems like a great idea if you’re looking to bring new faces to Adelaide Fringe. What are your targets around tourism and interstate visitors?

We aim to have 60,000 tourists at Adelaide fringe by 2025 and our partnership with Virgin Australia is a great way to support this goal. At the moment, we attract around 30,000 tourists, so we’re looking to double our interstate visitors to Adelaide Fringe in the next few years. Virgin Australia is committed to bringing visitors to South Australia year-round to see our great state and we are committed to continuing to create the ultimate destination in Australia for arts and culture, so the partnership is quite harmonious in this context.

Audiences don’t generally think about financing when it comes to festivals, can we discuss the funding structure of a festival such as Adelaide Fringe – How is it funded?

Fringe receives money from funding bodies such as the Government of South Australia, fundraising efforts including donors and philanthropy, the sale of merchandise and tickets and of course, sponsorship through our partners.

Partnerships have also been integral beyond funding for Adelaide Fringe in reaching the success we have in establishing ourselves as the biggest arts festival in Australia. The ability to share and amplify our message with partners such as Virgin Australia is truly important in this context.

As far as the individual events held by artists, producers and venues, there is a lot of investment upfront by those entrepreneurs who jump onto the Fringe platform and take advantage of one of the largest ticket buying audiences in the country. But that upfront risk also sits with the artists, venues and producers, so it’s important that we have funding through multiple avenues including partnerships to continue being able to support artists as best we can.

When you say ‘entrepreneurs’ – is this mainly Fringe hubs like Gluttony and The Garden?

There’s thousands of entrepreneurs in the Adelaide Fringe – some of them are producers of shows, some are venues or presenters, some are individual artists and some are our partners. The innovation we see from partners each year in how they engage with Fringe is truly creative.

We love an interactive partnership and our new partner Virgin Australia has absolutely come to the table in this regard. Fringe goers will be able to experience this interactive aspect themselves this year at the Virgin Australia Wonderful Hub which will be located on East Terrace, with some epic prizes to be won including free flights, Velocity Points, Fringe tickets and Betty’s Burgers!

Outside of funding, how do partnerships help events and organisations like Adelaide Fringe?

In our context we look for partners that have aligned values. Virgin Australia ticked this box for us immediately as they are known for challenging the status quo and shaking up markets. We consider ourselves a disrupter in the festival space so we really liked the perception of Virgin Australia within the brand’s own market, along with being known for championing people and the planet.

They wanted to come on board as a major partner because they’ve got considerable market share in east coast flights coming to South Australia. That lines up really well with us growing our audiences – as I said, we’ve got those big targets around getting tourists to come to Fringe.

Can you elaborate on some of the activities Adelaide Fringe and Virgin Australia have undertaken within the partnership?

Yes, absolutely, back in January we collaborated on an interstate activation in Sydney’s Martin Place along with SATC where we threw an event to capture the attention of Sydneysiders and share the message of Adelaide Fringe. Virgin Australia provided flights as part of a competition to bring some lucky interstate guests to Fringe and sent along some lovely team members to interact with our artists on the day.

Virgin Australia have also planned a ‘Fringe in the Sky’ event where an artist from Adelaide Fringe will perform on one of their flights to Adelaide- it’s moments like these that make the difference.

When you have a partnership with a company, do the benefits also extend to performers?

Absolutely! We’re always trying to find ways to help Fringe performers reduce the costs of putting on their shows at Fringe.

Virgin Australia this year are offering registered Adelaide Fringe artists 64kgs of free baggage, this is a wonderful perk for our artists and something we really lean into from a partnerships perspective. Supporting Fringe doesn’t just happen in a financial context, partners that understand we are here to support the actual artists is so important to us.

Ongoing partnerships can help ensure Adelaide Fringe will always be there. What are your plans with the Virgin Australia partnership?

The potential of our partnership with Virgin Australia looks truly limitless and we’d absolutely be looking to make this a long-term thing. This is obviously our first year and it’s a very exciting step in the right direction and we’ll be working together to extend it out over future years as well. We think the most benefit within our network of partners comes from long term relationships where the ability to work together and share each other’s stories gets bigger and better with each year.

Virgin Australia is helping to grow tourism in South Australia. The airline returned to pre-COVID levels of flying to Adelaide last month and will offer more than 58,000 seats per week during Adelaide Fringe.