Festival Action Plan

At the July meeting, the board authorized festival committee to continue to operate at a loss with the expectation that the losses will stop by the end of 2009. Furthermore, the board suggested a set of specific actions:

It is the sense of the Board that the Festival is significantly important to the community and that we should invest time and energy and money to recover Festival attendance to roughly 200 through

• 1. positive promotion,

  2. re-energizing the Festival program and workshops,

  3. better integration of newcomers

  4. and other ideas as they arise over the next two years.

The board also expressed its intent to monitor progress on stemming the financial losses and rebuilding attendance. Hence, festival follow up will be a standing agenda item for the next several meetings.

At present, I’d say we have a mixed bag in so far as finding the energy needed to revive festival attendance.

Most of the work so far has been by Jim King on promotions, his report is attached.

In the other areas, Margaret Crowl has volunteered to work on ideas to better integrate newcomers at festival. To date, she has not yet had time to devote to this task, but plans to be able to do so soon. She will start by picking up where Jim West left off in contacting newcomers to the past couple of festivals.

So far we’ve heard 3 ideas to make the program and workshops more compelling:

• 1. Enhance the dance by adding a second band and caller and adding more dance time

  2. Bring in a bigger name performer even if that means we have to relax the rule that performers must attend the whole festival

  3. Co-ordinate workshop activities with the Sierra Club

We have not, however, had any champions come forward to push these ideas.