I was at Womad 2008 and can agree with Eric that Show Of Hands got a good turn out. I go to a few festivals a year but when I've looked at our local FC offerings there's been nothing very enticing - if you can find out anything about them at all that is as many of them seem unaware of the existence of the Internet, or if they do the web pages are uninformative or many times broken.

I live in a rural area and we have a local Open Mike society that organize regular events around the area, they regularly get a good turn out of punters and acts (averaging maybe 15 performers and maybe 50 watchers) with the acts varying from poor to excellent, and they do a lot to get younger people and people of diverse styles joining in. Recently they put on a show of local performers in a pub's garden on a Sunday afternoon & evening, combined with stuff for the kids and a BBQ, and they got over 200 punters watching. I think their secret is they make going to one of their things seem fun.