Minnesota Festival Support
ACHF Cultural Heritage
We intend to increase the number of overall attendees and also increase the percentage of attendees that have never previously attended Irish Fair of Minnesota. Success will be measured by increased attendance and increased percentage of new fair goers. We will hire the University of Minnesota Tourism Center to design, conduct and evaluate an onsite demographic survey of attendees. 2: We intend to increase artist compensation and increase the number of artists and variety of art forms presented. A venue for performances by theater groups and visual artists will be implemented and we will increase the performance schedule. Staff will track artist contracts, compare with previous years, and implement an increased fee scale.
Overall attendance was down from the numbers projected and the percentage of new attendees was steady at 26% of the audience. Due to the anticipated road closures at the 2015, and the expense of a full Tourism Board Study, we utilized the questionnaire prepared for our studies conducted in 2014 and 2011 and conducted our own interviews. The results were consistent with previous years. We plan to use the University Tourism group again next year to continue to build on this longitudinal audience data. We do not feel we were able to achieve this outcome to the extant we hoped to, but feel confident that we will increase these numbers in 2016. 2: We opened a new venue at IFM on the Centennial Showboat where we presented an Irish documentary film and brought the Director from Ireland to speak to our audiences. Each time we are able to add a programmed venue to our long established performance venues we increase the number of artists we can present at IFM. We track compensation over the past three years on a Master Excel document. Sometimes we are not able to increase performance fees or times due to the limited availability of the artist or conflicts within the schedule.
Other, local or private