Operating Support Grant

Homegrown Music Festival wishes to use funds from the Operating Support Grant in two ways. The first goal is through technology by expanding on what we have from the previous Arrowhead Regional Arts Council Operating Support Grant we were awarded. There are four areas we would focus on to achieve this expansion. First, we would focus on enhancing the website's search functionality (tags). The second area we would focus on is the share function. Third would be the ability to add photo credits to all photos used on our website. The fourth focus would be training to learn the inner workings of the installments. The outcome of the expansion of website technology will allow our website users to better navigate our festival through searches for performers, scheduled events and photographers. The second goal is to host a Homegrown Music Festival Showcase at a local college to draw the new and existing college students to our local arts and music scene. This will serve as a volunteer recruitment event for the festival. As Homegrown Music Festival expands on website technology, the festival will track the traffic from our website and use this data to better understand the usage of the website's visitors. We will continue to look at how the functions within the website are being used. With this data, we will continue to plan future technology upgrades to the website with a focus on fast tracking and retrieval of information. Our website user is often in a time restraint to get from one venue to the next. Having an easy-to-use schedule search function is crucial for staff, volunteers, attendees and performers to plan their personal schedule to match the festival's schedule. With regard to tags, this will allow Homegrown and others to see where the people are. People like to share where they are and what they are doing. This is why Homegrown Music Festival wants to focus on building the share functions within the website. Allowing photos credits to be assigned to all photos gives the artist credit for the art shared. This can be handy when sharing photographs with outside businesses and media to ensure the photographer gets proper credit. Training from the company upgrading the website would be utilized to ensure that our Technology Director will be able to train the Homegrown staff on the new expansion. For our college residency event, we will track the effectiveness of volunteer recruitment and leverage that for future college residency events for years to come.