# Applying for council funding for your 2027 event? Your numbers weigh more than your story [Home](https://mijnevent.nl/en) / [Blog](https://mijnevent.nl/en/blog) / Applying for council funding for your 2027 event? Your numbers weigh more than your story organisers festival visitors dashboard # Applying for council funding for your 2027 event? Your numbers weigh more than your story Most Dutch municipalities close their 2027 event funding windows in September and October. The pots are smaller and the applications are not — organisers with hard visitor numbers go to the front of the queue. MijnEvent · 7 September 2026 · 8 min read ![](https://regify-mijnevent.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/blog/covers/event-funding-applications-2027-numbers.webp) Photo: [Jeffrey Zhang](https://unsplash.com/@jeffreyzhang_920?utm_source=MijnEvent&utm_medium=referral) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=MijnEvent&utm_medium=referral) In short - Many Dutch municipalities run their application window for 2027 events in September or October 2026; Den Helder, for example, keeps it open all of September. - Budgets are tight: Haarlem had 2.25 million euro to hand out and received applications worth over 3.3 million. - Councils ask your project plan for expected attendance, target audience, reach and how you will measure it — and afterwards for an evaluation report with the real figures. - If your ticket sales, gate scans and visitor feedback are already digital, that evidence is waiting for you — including at a free event. If your 2027 event needs money from the council, there is a good chance your application has to go out this month or next. Den Helder keeps its window for 2027 events [open throughout September 2026](https://www.denhelder.nl/evenementensubsidie), and that is not unusual: most Dutch municipalities work with a fixed application window in the autumn before the funding year. This year it is not a formality. The pots have shrunk; the applications have not. And that makes councils look harder at exactly the thing most organisers are weakest on: numbers. # Why it is tighter this year Dutch local government calls 2026 the *ravijnjaar* — the ravine year. Municipal income from central government drops sharply from this year on. The Association of Netherlands Municipalities calculated that the municipal fund would come in [some 2.4 billion euro lower](https://vng.nl/artikelen/gemeenten-vallen-in-financieel-ravijn), pushing roughly three quarters of all municipalities into deficit. Central government later softened the blow — around 3 billion cumulatively through 2027 — but softened is not solved. Events feel that more than most, for a dull administrative reason: in the Dutch system, culture and events are largely *not* a statutory duty. Youth care, waste collection and school transport are legally required; a village festival or a flower parade is not. Sector body Cultuur Oost points out in its analysis of municipal budgets that this makes culture [comparatively easy to cut](https://cultuuroost.nl/kennis-en-actueel/hoe-staat-het-met-de-gemeentelijke-cultuurbudgetten-in-ravijnjaar-2026), and that it varies enormously from town to town: one invests, the next one trims. What that means in practice shows up wherever a council publishes its figures. For its 2026–2028 event scheme, Haarlem had [2.25 million euro to distribute and received over 3.3 million in applications](https://haarlem.nl/subsidie-evenementen-2026-2028). One and a half times oversubscribed. So "we have always had funding" is not a plan — a third of that money went to somebody else, and the choice was made on significance for the city, quality, organisation and reach. The evidence for all four comes from you. # What a council actually wants to know Dutch funding schemes are published in full on the national register of local regulations, and reading them is instructive: they are far more concrete than the covering letters suggest. Vlaardingen asks the project plan for expected attendance, the target audience, and for [how and when you will measure your objectives, attendance, reach and audience appreciation](https://lokaleregelgeving.overheid.nl/CVDR742835). Afterwards, the accountability stage requires an evaluation that actually shows it. You will find that pattern in scheme after scheme, and it is exactly where volunteer-run organisations come unstuck. The programme and the budget always get filled in. But the question "how many people came last year, and where did they travel from?" is too often answered with the chair's best guess. A guess is not evidence, and an official with 1.5 times more applications than money cannot afford to accept one. # The four numbers that carry an application **1. How many people were there.** Not "about three thousand", but a figure with a source: tickets sold, scans at the gate, registrations. Free entry does not exempt you from this — more on that below. **2. Where they came from.** Regional reach is an explicit criterion in many schemes. Postcodes from your orders deliver it without effort: this share from the town itself, this share from the region, this share from beyond. One sentence — "41% of our visitors travelled in from outside the municipality" — does more work than half a page of prose. **3. What they thought of it.** Appreciation appears as a criterion in more and more schemes, and "everyone loved it" does not count. A short anonymous survey afterwards gives you a score with a respondent count under it. With [attendee feedback](/en/modules/attendee-feedback) you ask the people who were actually there, rather than whoever happens to see your Facebook post. The invitation goes out by itself after the event to visitors who checked in, and the results land in one overview with the average score and the respondent count beneath it. We described how that works in practice [in an earlier post](/en/blog/event-feedback-hear-what-visitors-thought). **4. What you raise yourself.** Councils would rather fund an event that covers part of its own budget. Ticket sales, sponsorship, bar takings, donations: the higher that share, the smaller the risk that your event collapses the moment a grant comes in lower. Put the percentage of own income straight into the application. It is a stronger argument than most organisers realise. # How to get those numbers without extra work The honest summary: if you start counting after the event, you are too late. You cannot retrieve postcodes afterwards, and you can no longer reach the people who came. What does work is making the registration a by-product of something you were doing anyway. Sell tickets online and you have counts, postcodes and timestamps automatically. Scan at the gate and you know how many people actually walked in, rather than how many bought. And in [Statistics you export all of it as CSV](/en/blog/statistics-and-csv-export) — a file you can attach to your accountability report as it stands. At a free event, ticketing feels like overkill. That is precisely where it is worth most: without a sale you have *no* figure at all. A free ticket with a QR code costs the visitor nothing, gives you a registration with a postcode, and produces a scan at the gate. We wrote about [ticketing for free events](/en/blog/free-events-with-ticketing) and what "free" then means in more detail. # The permit application asks for the same figures What many organisers only realise halfway through: the council asks for those numbers twice. Once for the grant, and once for the event permit. The safety plan that comes with such a permit sets out the expected audience profile, the number of visitors, how arrivals are spread across the day and the measures you take accordingly. Those are the same figures as above, on a different form. The [safety and permit module](/en/modules/safety-permit) exists for exactly that. It generates the monitoring, communication and evacuation sections in the terminology of the Dutch national NIPV framework, so you can paste them into your own council's format instead of writing them from scratch. During the event you see on one screen how many people are inside against your permitted capacity, per entrance, with the inflow across the day. There is a view-only link without an account for the council or emergency services, and afterwards an evaluation report comes out as a PDF. That report is meant for the council and the fire service, but it holds precisely the evidence your grant accountability needs as well: how many people were really inside, when they arrived, and how that compared with what you declared beforehand. Measure once, fill in two forms. # The evaluation report: do not start it afterwards Accountability is the stage that most often goes wrong. In many municipalities an evaluation is compulsory above a certain grant amount or attendance figure, and that evaluation helps decide whether you qualify again next year. It helps enormously to draft the report during your preparations: which four figures am I going to quote, and where will each come from? Then afterwards it is a matter of filling in the blanks. More importantly, you will measure the right things during the event, instead of discovering that nobody tracked the crowd. Run attendee feedback and the permit module alongside each other and that filling in really is just filling in: the score and respondent count come from the survey, the attendance and inflow figures from the evaluation report, and the postcode split from your orders. Three appendices you do not have to write. # Depending on it less is also a strategy Applying for funding and becoming less dependent on funding are not opposites — they are the same move. Every euro you raise yourself narrows the gap a council has to close, and that makes your application stronger, not weaker. Practical routes organisers around us use: a voluntary donation field in the checkout, gift cards that bring money in before the season starts, sponsor logos on the ticket PDF the visitor opens anyway, and a service fee line that carries the organising costs. None of them makes your event more expensive for people who would rather not chip in. And when you pick a ticketing system, look at what leaves your revenue per ticket. On a percentage platform the bill grows with your success; at MijnEvent it is a fixed amount per paid ticket, and free tickets cost nothing at all. For a village festival with three thousand free registrations, that is the difference between registering and not registering — and so between having evidence next year and not having it. # Getting started Check your municipality's website this week for the closing date of the 2027 window; in many towns it is 30 September or 1 October. Make sure your application contains at least one hard attendance figure with a source behind it. And if you do not have those numbers yet, set up the registration now, so you do have them when you apply for 2028. [See what MijnEvent costs](/en/pricing) or [create your organiser account](/registreer) — including for a free event, because that is where counting is worth the most. *This article is general information. Dutch funding schemes differ per municipality; always check the scheme and the deadline of your own council.* [ Back to blog ](https://mijnevent.nl/en/blog) MijnEvent ## Read more [ ![](https://regify-mijnevent.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/blog/covers/een-cursus-of-product-op-je-eigen-site.webp) integrations Jasper Koers · 4 September 2026 · 3 min read ## One course on your own site, not your whole catalogue The module widget always showed the full storefront. One extra attribute now puts exactly the right offering on the page where it belongs. ](https://mijnevent.nl/en/blog/embed-a-single-course-on-your-own-site) [ ![](https://regify-mijnevent.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/blog/covers/deelnemers-plaatsen-en-verplaatsen-in-je-cursus.webp) courses Jasper Koers · 4 September 2026 · 5 min read ## Signed up for the wrong course? Move them instead of charging them twice You can now place participants in a group yourself and move them between groups, with a member rate and the details you need alongside. ](https://mijnevent.nl/en/blog/move-a-participant-to-another-course-group) [ ![](https://regify-mijnevent.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/blog/covers/meerdaagse-events-dagtickets-passe-partout.webp) multi-day events Jasper Koers · 31 August 2026 · 4 min read ## Multi-day events: day tickets and a pass from a single event Sell a festival weekend or festive week with days on your event: single day tickets for those who come one day and a pass valid on every day. Check-in counts per day, so entering twice is impossible. ](https://mijnevent.nl/en/blog/multi-day-events-day-tickets-passes) MijnEvent ## Ready to get started? Create a free account and sell your first tickets today. [Start free](https://mijnevent.nl/registreer) [Pricing](https://mijnevent.nl/en/pricing)