Fest of us | Maine's 200 festivals could boost cultural tourism, if organizers give up the grassroots for a little from-away savvy
Photo/Kevin Bennett
A steel drum band played in a parade at last year's American Folk Festival, expected to draw 96,000 people to Bangor's waterfront this year.
Bangor’s riverfront is idle. Public works mini-dozers sit on splintered land between patches of neatly trimmed lawn. A handful of parked cars look out over an empty footpath along Penobscot River and the warehouses of Brewer’s riverfront to the east. The only signs of life on this cold and wet May afternoon are two seagulls preening themselves on the footpath’s wrought-iron rail.
But by late August, this three-quarter mile stretch from the Sea Dog Brewing Co. restaurant to Pickering Square will be filled with activity. About 96,000 people will come down to the river for the three-day American Folk Festival, one of the state’s most popular events. The festival began in 2002 as the National Folk Festival, put on by the Maryland-based National Council for the Performing Arts, and in 2005 became a locally produced event. This year, festival director Heather McCarthy plans to corral 23 performing groups, about a dozen artisans and nearly 50 food vendors to this spot along the river.
When it comes to ensuring the success of the folk festival, McCarthy has an edge — she directs two full-time, year-round festival staffers and works with a $1.2 million budget in a state where festivals tend to be run on a shoestring by part-time volunteers, and she hires a national promoter to book some of the festival’s biggest acts. McCarthy also has cold, hard facts to turn the heads of potential donors, because the folk festival holds the distinction of being the only festival in the state whose economic impact has been quantified. According to an April study from the Center for Tourism and Outreach at the University of Maine, festival visitors last year directly contributed $6.5 million to the Bangor area economy — $9.8 million if indirect expenditures are included. Exclusive festival visitors — the some 13% of those surveyed who came to town only for the festival — contributed $3.5 million in direct and indirect money into the economy.
McCarthy’s resources are unusual in Maine, where festivals tend to be ardently unsophisticated and the state’s efforts to help them grow haven’t matured. This lack of organization, one expert believes, leaves tourism money on the table.
The Maine Office of Tourism has never studied the economic impact of festivals statewide, other than to survey tourists about whether those events brought them to the state. According to that 2004 study, festivals, fairs and exhibitions are bit players in the tourism industry, wooing only about 8% of first-time visitors and 7% of repeat visitors, and are resoundingly bested by top attractions like food, shopping and friends and family. While some festivals have entertained locals and visitors for decades — the oldest, The Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland and The Maine Potato Blossom Festival in Fort Fairfield, celebrate their 62nd anniversaries this year — Maine festivals remain grassroots about fundraising and organization.
Despite the industry’s apparent penchant for staying small, Tourism Director Pat Eltman says festivals like the one in Bangor are key to bringing visitors to Maine, and especially to remote towns. The office’s new slogan is “There’s more to Maine,” and its attempt to highlight the aspects of Maine beyond lobster and moose mythology include, Eltman says, the good old-fashioned family fun known as festivals.
And Maine has plenty to choose from. There are festivals celebrating dog sledding, snowmobiling, antique snow vehicles, hot-air balloons, Jimmy Buffett, lighthouses, cars and antique airplanes, Cinco de Mayo, St. Patrick’s Day, Mardi Gras, the beginning of winter, the beginning of summer, “the friendship shared between Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick,” the Kennebec, Strong-Sandy and Narramissic rivers, the first naval battle in the American Revolution and the man who invented earmuffs. There are festivals based entirely on chocolate and others celebrating strawberries, blueberries, grapes, pumpkins, apples, oysters, lobsters, clams, maple syrup, chili, beer, wine and sardines. There are chamber music festivals and bluegrass festivals and one featuring country-grass, whatever that means. There are festivals to celebrate Acadian, Wabanaki, Scottish, Swedish and Franco-American culture. There’s even a festival called the “Whatever Family Festival” which combines a handful of independent festivals in the Gardiner area into a giant constellation of family fun that’s characterized by, well, nothing in particular. Whatever.
In total, Maine hosts nearly 200 festivals annually, according to state data, most of which are organized by volunteers, chamber staff and town officials. Festival organizers tend to operate independently year after year and their events usually break even but don’t turn a profit. In addition, this being the land of dogged independence, some festival directors are reluctant to share organizing details or strategies with neighboring festivals because they don’t want their best ideas stolen.
Feeding the crowds
Though festival organizers work hard to convince you otherwise, festivals aren’t all fun and games — organizers who get serious about planning and ambitious about vision can turn your average weekend oyster-fest into a year-round oyster attraction, in turn generating exponentially more tourist greenbacks. Travelers, after all, are increasingly interested in cultural travel, says Amy Jordan Webb, director of the Heritage Tourism Project in Denver, Colo., a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation that provides consulting services to cultural and heritage tourism efforts around the country. The average cultural tourist — or one who travels to check out arts scenes, ethnic communities and festivals — is slightly older than the average U.S. tourist (at age 49 versus 47), more affluent and educated, and spends more than the average visitor. According to a 2003 study by the Travel Industry Association of America and Smithsonian Magazine, cultural tourists spend an average of $623 per traveler versus the $457 spent by other travelers, are more likely to use a hotel, motel or bed and breakfast and more apt to spend more than $1,000 on a vacation.
Some 118 million American adults included cultural activities in their travels in 2002, the most recent year data is available, equaling about half of the U.S. adult population. And the trend is growing — cultural tourism volume increased 13% from 1996 to 2002, from 192.4 million trips to 216.8 million trips each year, according to the study. Festivals have in turn become more specific than ever to highlight their community’s unique special something.
“It’s really a shift,” says Webb. “A generation ago, we were seeing more generic festivals. Today, it’s a unique hook that is really about your local culture and local heritage that gives you much more of an opportunity to attract people, particularly people who are coming from far away and looking for something that they wouldn’t be able to get back home.”
Most Maine festivals find their income close to home, relying on a mix of municipal funding and local individual and corporate donations, and funneling any modest profit into next year’s festival. That model keeps the lights on but doesn’t promote growth, and most festivals never reach the critical mass necessary to spark buzz beyond their immediate region. According to Donna McNeil, director of the Maine Arts Commission, only a few of Maine’s many festivals apply for the some $100,000 in grants available to them every year, and the applicants are usually the state’s most organized and established, such as the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston and the American Folk Festival.
Paying staff is critical, Webb says, to stabilize management and grow the festival into a real moneymaker — a year-long event. Webb points to the Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., population 5,000. Beginning in 1973, the festival limped along for two decades attracting only a few dozen attendees annually until organizers in the early 1990s decided to professionalize the event. They worked with the Heritage Tourism Initiative to reorganize festival planning, boosting attendance to around 10,000 people annually, and raised money to open a storytelling center in 2002 to attract visitors year round.
In Bangor, American Folk Festival Director McCarthy hopes one day her festival will build its own bricks-and-mortar center, but her immediate goal is to line up multi-year donors so she doesn’t have to start her budget from scratch every fall.
“We would like to see revenue from all of our sources become reliable and steady so that the future of the festival isn’t always in question,” McCarthy says. “Our hands are pretty much full right now trying to stabilize the future of this event.”
Sara Donnelly, Mainebiz managing editor, can be reached at sdonnelly@mainebiz.biz.
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