Category Archives: Events

Fail Festival is an endless movement to talk honestly about failure in philanthropy and development.

Fail Festivals are crash and burn parties around the world to celebrate failure as a mark of leadership, innovation, and risk-taking in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scaling ideas from pilots to global programs.

Here are a few of our more famous public events.

You can organize your own Fail Festival, or get professional help to curate a great Fail Festival at your next event.

Fail Festival UK 2015

8bdf3a4d-8d0f-4f7d-8775-8817926683c0

Failure is the f-word of international development. Unspoken in polite company, but a reality in our work. We’re often in market failure environments, so who are we to expect success 100% of the time?

That’s why its time for the third Fail Festival UK. Building on Fail Faire UK 2012 and Fail Fest UK 2014, we are on a mission to make failure acceptable in development discussions. There is great value in examining our mistakes and learning from failure as we go beyond the easy and the simple.

Continue reading Fail Festival UK 2015

Fail Festival DC 2014

fail2014550

Fail Festival – a celebration of failure as a mark of leadership, innovation, and risk-taking in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scaling ideas from pilots to global programs.

Failure is the f-word of international development. Unspoken in polite company, but a reality in our work. We’re often in market failure environments, so who are we to expect success 100% of the time?

That’s why it was time for Fail Festival 2014, our 4th annual event, where we had much laughter as 300 of our peers and colleagues navel-gazed at where we have all gone wrong in international development… and learned how not to star in next year’s Fail Festival.
Continue reading Fail Festival DC 2014

Fail Festival UK 2014

failfestuk2014550Failure is the f-word of international development. Unspoken in polite company, but a reality in our work.  That’s why it was time for Fail Festival UK 2014. We are on a mission to make failure acceptable in development discussions. There is great value in examining our mistakes and learning from failure as we go beyond the easy and the simple.
Continue reading Fail Festival UK 2014

Fail Festival DC 2013

failfestival2013logos4

Failure is the f-word of international development. Unspoken in polite company, but a reality in our work. We’re often in market failure environments, so who are we to expect success 100% of the time?

That’s why we had Fail Festival DC 2013. We are on a mission to make failure acceptable in development discussions. There is great value in examining our mistakes and learning from failure as we go beyond the easy and the simple.
Continue reading Fail Festival DC 2013

Fail Faire DC 2012

failfaire-dc
Fail Faire DC was back for another year of celebrating failure as a mark of innovation and risk-taking. We had have great speakers with fun, fast, Ignite-style presentations of their professional failures.

Audience participation was not only encouraged, it was mandatory! We are all peers and none of us is perfect. We had much laughter as we navel-gazed at where we have all gone wrong in ICT and international development.
Continue reading Fail Faire DC 2012