Improving festival management

By Lu Barron

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It's here! My favorite time of the year. As the former executive director of the Freedom Festival, I still relish the festival and consider it the region's greatest community celebration.

Dozens of activities over some three weeks culminate in a Fourth of July fireworks show capable of lifting a community's spirit and taking an individual's breath away.

While the Freedom Festival remains the signature event, it is far from our only community celebration. The Downtown Farmers Market is one of the largest outdoor markets in the Midwest. We have parades for virtually every holiday. We have the BBQ Roundup and other events that are affiliated with the Freedom Festival but run by other organizations.

We have an outdoor family movie series. We've also had great single-day events like last fall's Fireball Run that was run by staff from the Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau. We are a community of festivals for all seasons, including the winter Fire & Ice that draws crowds regardless of the temperature.

The proliferation of events like these has been great for the community. But it also has led to a question that I've heard more people asking: Are we doing festival and event management and operations in the most effective and efficient way?

Many local organizations now have skilled and experienced event planners on staff. Many of them work together on some of these events, sharing everything from equipment to knowledge.

Although the events themselves are unique, event management is not. Everyone deals with similar vendors, permits and logistics. Everyone deals with insurance, volunteer management and sponsorship recruitment. All events do similar promotional activity.

I suspect many of them also deal with the same challenges. I know time management was always a struggle when I ran the Freedom Festival.

Some other communities have leveraged the synergies among events by moving to a “Festivals Inc.” non-profit organization through which many community celebrations are managed. Done right, such an organization maintains the unique character of each individual celebration, but coordinates resources so all of them are run more efficiently and effectively. One important benefit of this coordination is a single point of contact for the many events that take place year-round.

I don't know if that's the right answer here. But it's the right conversation to have. Investors, board members and staff from all of our community celebrations should gather after the Freedom Festival to take a close look at this. If we can do it better, let's get to it.

Lu Barron is Linn County Supervisor, District 1. Comments: lu.barron@linncounty.org