SEELEY LAKE - The Bob Marshall Music Festival ended more than a week ago but the work is still ongoing.
Revenue and expenditure checks are still coming in, hard numbers on attendance are still being calculated and feedback is being processed.
The Seeley Lake Community Foundation, the organization that put on the music festival, had a board meeting on Monday to go over the results.
“We are just so excited to have done it and we’re extremely pleased with the way it seems to have boosted the economy of all the businesses here in Seeley Lake,” said Foundation Board President Carla Schade. “People came from all over the state so it exposed Seeley Lake to a huge audience of people who had never been here before.”
While the foundation is still tallying attendance numbers, Schade said that more than 1,000 tickets were sold and that “there was more attendance than last year, but not significantly more.”
Even though ticket prices were higher than last year, Schade said the Foundation was disappointed in the financial returns. As of yet, the Foundation isn’t sure if they broke even on the festival.
“In the future I think we’ll be reevaluating the whole event,” said Schade, noting that one idea would be to condense the festival into two days rather than four. “We don’t know at this time if we’ll be doing it again.”
To help make that decision, the Foundation has put out two surveys to elicit feedback as well as extensive outreach via social media. The results so far have been overwhelmingly positive.
“Most of the feedback had something to say about the friendliness of the people of Seeley Lake,” said Schade. “That is such a star in our cap because that was repeated over and over; ‘the event was exciting but the people were so friendly, and the volunteers were so helpful.’”
The Foundation will spend the next month going over the results and feedback before they make any hard decision over their future involvement with the festival.
“The logistics of doing something that big are immense,” said Schade. “It takes a huge cadre of volunteers and that asks a lot of the members of this small community.”
Reader Comments(0)