Festivals & Events in Jeopardy?
A citizen movement to make sure they thrive!
One of the most eye-opening things I’ve ever read in my life, was a report shared with me by IEG Founder Lesa Ukman in May 2024, from her current company Pro Social Valuation (PSV). She sent it after we had discussed the current state of local festival and community event sponsorship. Everyone appreciates the pure economic value created by local events. Hotel room nights (“heads in beds”), restaurant receipts, and retail sales activity, are the common metrics to assess economic impact provided by festivals and events. The 13-page PDF I read actually addressed the dollar value of the SOCIAL impact arts and cultural events can have on communities, something I had never seen before. My viewing of this document and what it represents, set off a series of actions that could culminate in a significant political movement that I’d like to share with you on this most political of days, Election Day 2024.
This story is not about sponsorship as much as what is at stake and what must be done to protect and defend one of the most common sponsorship property types.
Community festivals & events today
While we all know and love them, they don’t just happen. They require a lot of planning and funding. In the past, the costs associated with festivals and events were relatively modest, and there seemed to be a large corporate sponsorship appetite to write checks to have them. But due to a number of factors, neither is true anymore. Event costs have skyrocketed, and due to so many more especially digital marketing options, corporate sponsorship funding has ebbed. An event might have the same number of sponsors from one year to the next, but the amount those sponsors are paying is going down in most cases, and costs are going up in all cases.
Not all events are in trouble of course, but some have already disappeared, and if something isn’t done to change the course the industry is on, they could start to vanish in large enough numbers that it materially impacts our quality of life. We can argue that people will find other places to spend their time and money without festivals and events, but what will replace their social value to our communities? This is why we need to be proactive about protecting them.
Already, we see particularly music festivals being canceled in large numbers. And there was a recent report that indicated 85% of Film Festival organizers said they need government help to survive. During the Covid pandemic, cities allocated money to produce local events as a means to reinvigorate their communities, but those budgets have already been cut as municipalities expect corporate sponsors to pick up the slack.
The financial pressures on event organizers
There was a time when corporations had the mentality that if they sponsored local community events and festivals, the government would leave them alone because they were being a good corporate citizen. But as corporate consolidation and the internet took over the economy, there were fewer companies tied to their communities, replaced by mega-corporations that served the entire country with no skin in the game locally. Companies like Google and Facebook not only sucked money out of communities that used to go to local ad platforms like newspapers, they started using that money not to invest in the communities they operated in, but to hire government lobbyists who write laws favorable to them and their interests. Not to put too fine a point on it, but corporate lobbying spending has increased by almost 3x since 1998, with a whopping $4.26 Billion spent in 2023 alone. On just that basis, there will be less money available for local community event sponsorship. This is an oversimplification, but why spend money on the local arts festival in hopes being a good corporate citizen will lead to more sales from residents, when you can get laws written that extract more money from their pockets by force of law?
Not only have more corporate dollars gone to government lobbying, we are also operating in an exploding digital marketing world that offers much more accountability and precision than the notoriously ambiguous value of event sponsorships. Marketers can precisely target their audiences with online ads and track purchase behavior. They can hire social media influencers and sponsor YouTube channels, all with great awareness of ROI on dollars spent. Some event organizers will say they offer tax write-offs for their sponsors, but any legitimate business expense can be written off, including digital marketing campaigns. Government lobbying can’t be written off, but the fact so much money is invested in it without any write-off is indicative of just how great the ROI on government lobbying is.
But it isn’t just that funding sources are drying up. There are multiple factors leading to skyrocketing event costs too. The most obvious one is the monopoly Ticketmaster has on the entertainment, ticketing, and venue businesses. This drives costs to get performers to appear at events, but also the venues themselves. A more under the radar cost driver is event insurance. Why insurance? Because thanks to the -accidental, but nonetheless real - symbiotic incentive structures that exist between social media and lawyers, young kids do dumb things like staging mayhem and pranks recorded at events to become TikTok celebrities. Then lawyers for the victims of those pranks sue events and go after their insurance policies without any caps on damages! This dynamic is raising the cost of event insurance policies to the point insurance cost is currently the greatest source of inflation for event organizers.
So when you hear about this event or that event being canceled due to a lack of funding, it may in fact be true. But it might be more because the cost has gone up too much (sometimes for dumb reasons), and sponsors aren’t giving as much now because they are trying to pick our pockets with government help rather than investing in the communities they serve as a means to build the goodwill that makes us want to give our money to them of our own free will.
It all adds up to event organizers having to make more formerly FREE events paid and ticketed, charging higher prices for already ticketed events, and having to charge more for everything at them. All of these forces drive down attendance, and puts them at more risk, to the point many (particularly music festivals) get canceled because tickets are just too damn expensive and not enough people buy them. Rather than risk making contract commitments to vendors (needed to put on events) when ticket sales are initially slow (and being stuck having to pay vendors without enough revenue from the event), organizers cancel them. So now event vendors aren’t paid. They go out of business, and there are fewer vendors. This in-turn raises the cost for the remaining events. Last month the CEO of the Tournament of Roses told me there are just two companies that can provide adequate security for the Rose Parade. Imagine the cost increase the Tournament of Roses faces if there is just one.
It is not easy to quickly find deals brands have done without a database you can easily access and SponsorPitch is the most affordable database of verified sponsorship deals available on the market. Yes, it would be nice if there were more Buyers on the platform, but your job isn’t to contact Buyers as much as it is to be educated about which Buyers to contact. Once you have done your research and feel good about who to pitch, SponsorPitch has thousands of Buyer contacts for you, listed by brand. It also gives you the ability to post a pitch of your property, with a link to share with Buyers, so you can send presentation decks without attachments that can be blocked by corporate email security systems. Check it out at http://sponsorspitch.com
Fighting back with the social value argument
When Bethlehem Steel was shuttered in 2003, there were serious questions about what would happen to this Pennsylvania town’s economy. What could possibly replace the economic impact of a steel mill? Enter ArtsQuest, a nonprofit effort to revitalize the area with a wide range of music, performing and visual arts offerings. Sounds crazy to think an arts initiative could match that kind of economic impact, right? Well, amazingly, over 20 years later, ArtsQuest has actually surpassed the Economic Value the steel plant created!
But what about the Social Value? Because it is commonplace for politicians to only consider Economic Value when making fiduciary decisions, that’s pretty much what they focus on. Any notions of Social Value might be dismissed as “feel good” but not relevant to pure dollars and cents. It’s unfortunate that the “good” we intrinsically feel from festivals and events can’t be appreciated and pursued for good’s sake. I mean look at how many school arts programs are cut to “save money.” But if the world we live in is going to be dominated by people looking at spreadsheets and crunching numbers, it is incumbent on those of us who want socially valuable activities happening, to present data that allows their value to be seen through a financial lens.
The report Lesa Ukman shared with me was an assessment of the Social Value created by ArtsQuest in 2019. It put dollar values on multiple different products of ArtsQuest activity to conclude the organization created $100M in Social Value over the one year assessment period. The PSV assessment demonstrated the dollar values of things like:
Arts exposure to young people increases their tolerance to other perspectives and reduces future criminal activity as result
Mixing people together from different income levels leads to greater upward mobility
Volunteering creates more pride in community and more commitment to making it better
The Average Household Income (HHI) in Lehigh Valley (where ArtsQuest is based) is the highest in all of PA, while comparable cities with big metal plants (like Bethlehem Steel) have half the Avg. HHI of Lehigh Valley
Better health, with less stress, lower teen pregnancy rates, lower child abuse and neglect than comparable cities without significant arts exposure
Obviously, few organizations have the capacity to assess the Social Value of their local festivals and community events like ArtsQuest did. The people who did the assessment typically work for large corporations and charge a lot of money for their work. But I feel - and I think most people would agree - if ArtsQuest event activities have the impact they have been found to have, we can safely assume similar types of community-oriented activities are just as impactful.
This isn’t all that surprising. Modern technology has isolated us from each other and disrupted how we socially interact with fellow humans. There are numerous studies that demonstrate how the number of positive social experiences and relationships we have is actually the greatest predictor of health and lifespan. Community festivals and events provide a place for us to come together, get exposed to new ideas, have fun experiences, and feed our souls.
Most of us have sort of intrinsically known the value of festivals and events, and we could understand the economic impact arguments, but Pro Social Valuation has put in the work to come up with actual dollar values for their social benefits. This arms us with the facts we need to argue why strengthening the festival and event industry is a worthwhile endeavor.
Enter Save Our Events
We need to make a case for and build a citizen movement around the idea that local festivals and community events aren’t just fun for us, they are GOOD for us. As such, we must organize, educate, then push for initiatives that protect and defend local festivals and community events as a priority.
This is what led to Save Our Events (SOE), an idea, brand, and mission for everyone who loves experiencing in-person events, appreciates their social value, and benefits from them economically. It is an idea and movement to organize and mobilize people to get active in supporting them. The idea is to have individuals join the mailing list and/or follow SOE on social media, then eventually have them tell their elected representatives to support legislation and make funds available that ensure local festivals and events are adequately funded, supported, and protected.
This whole SOE initiative really only has a chance to get started because I was fortunate enough to meet an MBA Student at Northeastern University who has a passion for local festivals and events. I shared some initial research and dot connecting for the idea, but she was available to manage the digital presence (website, social media, etc.) and make it possible to start spreading the SOE message with content that promotes its mission.
When I presented Save Our Events to Bekemeh “Bekah” Airewele, she liked the idea of doing something to protect events, because as she says, “Six Flags, 4th of July fireworks, and the Lynn, MA City Festival was my childhood, and when I lived in Oakland for three years, there was some cool community event going on every weekend.” When we first talked Bekah had no idea how big of a challenge it is to produce and fund these events she loved. Before SOE she never knew how expensive they are to produce. “If you had asked me how much a small parade is, I’d say maybe “$5k or something like that. Now I know $10k doesn’t even cover security. I thought because these events were so valuable there is probably some line item in the city budget to fund them, and now I know that is not the case."
So what you have in Bekah is a young person (Gen Z) who has a passion for local festivals and events, but has basically taken them for granted, and only now understands that like “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” if we aren’t proactive about getting festivals and events protected, they will diminish, and we will lose the immense - and unknown to most - Social Value they create. We need to educate and inform thousands of people about what we know and get them motivated to participate in the political process through the SOE prism, maybe in ways they didn’t know could be relevant to them. As Bekah says, “SOE has made me see my voting power can be more relevant to me than I ever thought before. I now can see how I can impact something in my everyday life that doesn’t seem so big and overwhelming, like taxes, healthcare, and other issues that feel so beyond my control.” As I was interviewing Bekah, I asked her to summarize why she wants to be involved with SOE. Her answer kind of said it all: “We need to save the last thing we have to connect socially in an authentic way.”
SOE objectives
Save Our Events is not a dedicated organization. It is an idea and a mindset for likeminded people to share. It is a brand identity that can ultimately be monetized to fund efforts aimed at passing laws that protect and defend the industry. You get involved by joining the mailing list and following SOE on Instagram.
SOE needs organizations (trade associations, CVBs, city event departments) who produce or have members who produce community events, to share SOE with event organizers, and have them share it with their event audiences. It then needs vendors who supply events, hotels, restaurant groups, and businesses that benefit from them to promote SOE. Finally, it needs the insurance companies who provide insurance, and companies who sponsor events, to lend their support to the SOE mission to bring down the cost of local festivals and events.
Is this a daunting task, to organize and mobilize thousands, maybe millions of people? Yes it is. But when you consider the staggering social benefits - many still not even addressed in this story - local festivals and community events have, operate on a belief that when more people know and appreciate these benefits it will be a much easier task, the goal is certainly achievable.
If looking to do something really meaningful as a human being, I can’t think of anything more rewarding than knowing you played a part in preserving and maybe even increasing the positive social impact of local festivals and events in your community. Because as Bekah says, “what would be the point of living if there is nothing to do and no way to experience our humanity?”