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Downtown Businesses <br />Businesses with Reader <br />Boards <br />Non -Profit Organizations <br />Partnered with the Downtown Association to have businesses decorate and <br />display Jazz Saxophones in their windows as part of a promotional. <br />Every year Fitterer's entire corner window features decorations elaborating a <br />Jazz theme (based on our poster) during the month of July. <br />Display our dates throughout the month of July <br />JIV has for many years provided Festival Tickets to local non-profit <br />organizations to aid in their fundraising efforts <br />We also commit a page of our brochure to events happening in downtown Ellensburg that weekend. <br />6. Please explain what plans exist to allow this project to become self-sustaining. Include any plans for <br />ticket sales, event sponsors, and other cost -recovery models. <br />Over the past 19 years we have accumulated enough cash reserves that if there was a disaster we could <br />still put on a festival. One of our goals from the beginning of this festival was to bring out-of-towners into <br />our community during the middle of summer when business can be slow. We have worked hard to provide <br />a quality product that is affordable. The festival actively requests support through community donations <br />(in-kind and monetary) and from ticket sales to the general public. Being an all -volunteer organization, we <br />also depend on community members for our work force. We have around 200 volunteers every year who <br />buy their own tickets but provide the manpower to help set up/take down the venues, monitor the venues <br />for ticket holders, train and serve in the beer garden, and sell our merchandise in the Box Office. The only <br />people we pay are the Box office managers during the Festival, the Security officers and those involved <br />with delivering the outstanding music. <br />There are two reasons the governing board of JIV has avoided "branding" the festival with corporate <br />festival sponsors for 19 years: <br />• Believing that the emphasis should be on the community and the music. <br />• Not wanting to depend on corporate whims which have doomed more than one festival of our <br />genre when their support was withdrawn. <br />The last three years we have seen our expenditures exceed our revenues. We will be reevaluating our <br />marketing strategies along with discussions on the impact of increasing our ticket prices. <br />7. Additional information: Provide any additional information which will assist the Lodging Tax Advisory <br />Committee in evaluating your project and its benefit to tourism. Please limit any additional written <br />information to one page and any other additional attachments to 3 pages. Regardless of how much <br />additional information is included, only 3 pages will be provided to reviewers. <br />The Jazz Board consists of 28 volunteers who donate countless hours of their time throughout the year to <br />develop and promote the festival. Per your request, we asked the Board members to estimate their time <br />commitment during the year. There are about 175-200 other volunteers who contribute their time the <br />week before and during weekend of the festival (see Exhibit C for the estimated $ value). The festival has <br />no paid staff other than limited ticket booth staffing during the festival, security officers, and the musicians <br />along with the sound techs. <br />This will be our 20th year offering the festival and every year festival board members have done informal <br />surveys of the restaurants and motels and have received information from them that this is one of the best <br />weekends they have during the year. We hope to do more thorough studies in the future, with the help of <br />the Visitor's Center which (we think) will confirm the anecdotal information. <br />Application Questions Page 6 <br />