SoNo Park Holiday Fest - Success in the Street!

It's now been a few weeks since we put on the SoNo Park Holiday Fest.  The event was a street fair in North Park benefiting McKinley Elementary, and we had 3 goals:

1. Raise money for McKinley's arts and music programs - our target being at least as much as we did in 2009 with the Chili Cook-Off and Arts and Crafts Fair.
2. Draw in the community to support McKinley.  The school had a tendency to hit up the school families over and over again. We wanted to start an event where the community would pay to participate, and we would build a knowledge and experience base to do it again in the future.
3. Last but not least, put on a fun event! We wanted attendees, restaurants, bands and vendors to want to do it again and go away talking about it so they'd draw in even more people for the next year.  They'd also see what a special school McKinley is because they do this kind of event.

I'm pleased to say that met all 3 goals.  Having goals really helped us focus our efforts and to set expectations with the McKinley PTC and participating businesses.  It's also a basis for us to say we were successful.  While we haven't completed the final accounting for the event, we've surpassed last year's fund-raising from the 2 events we replaced by more than $1,000.  We wanted to get at least 1000 people to attend from the local community, and our best estimate is that we had more than 2000.  And while the "fun" aspect is harder to measure, the anecdotal evidence suggests people had a great time.  We received many compliments from a broad range of participants, such as "This was the best street fair ever!"  Perhaps most importantly, we learned a lot, and we have many insights that will enable us to make next year's event even more successful - especially financially.  In light of our fun goal, we may have erred on the side of providing too much value.  Something for us to consider.

I'll go into some of learning at a different time.  In the meantime, here are some pictures of the event, and I've highlighted some of the gear provided by Party Production Rentals: beer tent, belly bar with linen, stage, canopies, pop-ups, tables with umbrellas.