Project Grant - Round 1
ACHF Arts Access
We expect that 600 people will attend this concert, and that 25% of those, or 150 patrons, will participate in the Sing-Along. Of those 25%, we expect most of those to be high school students and people from the Saint Cloud area that have sung in a Messiah Chorus at a previous time in their lives. We expect that this may be one of the few times that regional high school students will be able to participate in this classic work during their high school lives. We expect 30 or more singers – gathered from the 80+ singers who took part in the Messiah concerts of 2006 and 2007 under the direction of Lee Nelson and performed at the Paramount – to again take the stage and join Kantorei in the choruses. We expect these 30 singers to be fine singers with previous experience, but, currently, have no outlet to sing with a group because they cannot commit to a year of rehearsals and concerts. Thus, they end up not singing at all. We expect the audience to gain new knowledge of the evolution of this professional singing group that has its roots in Saint Cloud 25 years ago, and continues today as one of Minnesota’s top vocal performing groups.1) Attendance and box office records. 2) Response from the high schools indicating the number of students that will be participating in the sing-along. 3) All of the community participants in the on-stage chorus (those who have sung previously and will be joining Kantorei onstage for the second half of the concert) will be asked to answer 3 questions regarding the impact of their participation. 4) All of the ticket purchasers for whom we have emails will be asked via email to answer a few short questions regarding the impact of this first-ever sing-along. 5) An optional, short survey will be included in all of the programs that are handed out to attendees. This survey is included in all of the Local Roots Series Concerts. 6) We will be ordering scores for those who wish to participate in the sing-along but don’t have a score. We will be using these scores for future use. The number of scores we will need to order will help us measure the goal of impacting the lives of those in the community who wish to sing with a major event, but cannot commit to a year-long rehearsal and concert schedule of local community choirs.
1) We expected 600 patrons and the actual amount was 502. 2) We expected 30 community members to join Kantorei onstage to sing with Messiah, but only 16 did. This is because there were three other choral concerts that night, and many of the singers in those groups were the singers that we expected to join Kantorei onstage. 3) We expected 250 patrons to sing along with Messiah during the choral sections. However, the actual amount exceeded this by over 100 to our estimates. We printed 250 copies of the choral sections, and we ran out with many patrons wanting them. Next time we will be prepared for 400. Far fewer people had their own scores than we anticipated, though many did. 5) We expected over 100 high school students to participate - but many of the high school students, including the members of the Youth Chorale of Minnesota, the likely singers, had their own concert that night. The methods we used for this evaluation were ticket sales, observation during the concert, and comparison with scores printed vs scored needed. We also put a 1/2 page survey into each program. We printed 600 surveys, but only 12 were returned.
Other, local or private