GO Outside Festival: A Vendor System the Staff Run Themselves

The GO Outside Festival, run by the Roanoke Outside Foundation and now presented by Carilion Clinic, fills downtown Roanoke with three days of outdoor sports, demos, and music every October.

Behind it, a small staff signs up food vendors, exhibitors, and sponsors. Each has its own pricing and discounts, its own insurance requirements, and its own county, city, and foundation paperwork. A festival that size cannot wait on a developer every time an application opens, a price changes, or a certificate needs checking.

I built the festival’s website and vendor system in 2020 and have run and improved it every year since. For 2026 the vendor side was rebuilt around how the festival actually works: three application tracks with their own pricing, payment at the point of approval, and the insurance and safety paperwork that follows.

One rule guided the rebuild. Staff should never need me to run the festival. Anything that changes from year to year, from application windows to festival hours, became a setting they control.

Vendors apply through one of three tracks, food, exhibitor, or sponsor and partner, with fees and add-ons calculated as they fill in the form. Approval creates their account and emails them a link to set a password. From their own dashboard they pay by card or commit to mailing a check, upload certificates of insurance, and sign the county, city, and foundation agreements online.

Card payments run through Stripe, with the processing fee added to the vendor’s total so the foundation receives the full amount. Staff see every uploaded document on the vendor’s record, export vendor data whenever they need it, and open or close each application type themselves. Each season is archived, so returning vendors keep their history.

Attendees get a public schedule they can filter by category, location, and day, with favorites they can save. And when Carilion Clinic became the presenting sponsor in August 2026, the logo, colors, and every sponsor reference across the site changed over in a single release.

By August, festival staff were opening and closing vendor applications on their own, without a call to me. Vendors applied, paid, and filed their paperwork online through the season, and the system carried the festival through October 16 to 18, with the last reported issues fixed the day before it opened.

Because card fees are passed through to vendors, every application fee now reaches the foundation in full.