Art Project

One of our goals, as outlined above, is to help our community overcome geographic the economic barriers to accessing high-quality musical performances close to home. We can provide high-quality entertainment and musical education to our community members, many of whom might not be able to see and hear, in person, this quality of music and performance in different genres. Another goal is to play our part in instilling the arts into our community and the public life of our region. The New London Music Festival has become a yearly tradition where people can come to enjoy the day and experience the rich, live-music tradition of our region and our country. We feel that this is very much in tune with a civic goal of the city of New London: to make the arts an everyday part of community life. We have consciously attempted, over the past several years, to involve even more local businesses and organizations with the festival, whether in sponsorships, donations in kind, or as part of the group of vendors who provide food for the festival. We want to make the Festival, as much as possible, a completely local event celebrating the arts in New London. We have continued to have success in the past two years and will continue to pursue our goal of increasing the number of attendees between the ages of 25-50, who have been historically under-represented in our audiences. Each year the Festival Committee reviews survey forms, which are given to each attendee. Attendees are given an incentive to return the forms by the award of a cash door prize given to a randomly selected person who has filled out and returned a survey form. The results of this survey tell us a lot about the demographics of our audience, what they liked and disliked about the music and the artists, and what we can do better for next year. We also closely review attendance based on ticket sales and monitor comments left on our Facebook site, Website, and New London Music Festival e-mail. The comments are very useful as they help give us a sense of what genres of music are interesting and valuable to our audience and what new areas we might explore. A committee meeting is held following the Festival day each year to read, analyze, and discuss the results and plan for the coming year. We measure our success in terms of total attendance (although we need to factor in local weather conditions on Festival day), attendance increases within the 25-50 age group we have targeted to build up and increases in survey approval ratings from year to year, as well as specific comments made by our attendees.