International Quint Cities Festival

Project Description The International Quint Cities Festival is a new hybrid festival model. Our design is “everywhere at once” in the Quad Cities. Rather than plan 100,000 people at a single location like the Mississippi Fair Grounds, we are planning events at all our local music venues. Rock and roll here, country there, etc. Planning and overhead costs: The planning involves contacting all the venues, secure the venue rental, obtain our music, film, art and culinary talents, build our website www.internationalqcf.org, print our fliers, purchase advertisements and employ our staff. Obtaining the best talent that sells tickets is the largest overhead cost with bands charging between $30,000 and $250,000. The FY22 Iowa Tourism arts grant will help cover our overhead costs and make the Quint Cities a regional, national and international destination. Affect on long term financial stability and effectiveness: Our annual festival will help build our Quint Cities region as a cool, diverse, inclusive region in which you can live, be employed and enjoy the arts and culture that makes our region unique. The East Moline Foundation arts grant support will help our festival realize our mission, make the Quint Cities a tourist destination, fill all the hotel rooms and draw revenue from other regions and nations here. The Quad City mayors want our region developing events that draw business revenue from other regions and nations and the International Quint Cities Festival is just such event. Partnership and collaboration with organizations: The International Quint Cities Festival will partner with nonprofit groups like the River Music Exeperience, the Davenport Partnership, the Raccoon Motel, QC Chamber of Commerce businesses and individuals who all want our Quint Cities region seeing business growth. How has the pandemic affected the business? The International Quint Cities Festival obtained our nonprofit tax exempt status at the end of April 2021. Thus, we were never affected from the pandemic. The pandemic won’t affect our business because our festival design is disbursed among all our Quint Cities venues rather than planning a festival a single location like the Mississippi Fair Grounds. Project Evaluation: The project evaluation will employ the ticket company Eventbrite www.eventbrite.com. The Raccoon Motel and the Redstone Room employ Eventbrite will success. We can measure our demographics of our customers from the Eventbrite website. Ticket sales, demographics, regional draw of our festival, etc. will all be measured within the festivals Eventbrite account. The festival tickets will be $25 and we plan between 500 and 2,500 tickets will be purchased the first year with an increase of 500 ticket sales each year. These are conservative projections of the first year. The first Bix 7 in 1975 was small and then became our largest international draw every year. Further, we will see tshirts and merchandise sales.