INCREASING audience numbers and attracting more sponsorship – but not increasing ticket prices – will be the way forward for the Frome Festival to ensure its continued success in future years.
The annual 10-day festival, which has put Frome on the map as being one of the best festivals throughout the country, held its Annual General Meeting last week.
Bob Morris, chair of the trustees said, “It was a fairly well attended meeting for an AGM and well tempered. We looked at the loss on this year’s festival and what we can do to avoid that in the coming year”.
Sponsorship & marketing will form a renewed focus for next year’s festival.
Bob said, “We’ve got two groups of people, one looking at sponsorship and the other at marketing. We are keen on getting some large sponsors back if we can.
“We had 70 sponsors this year which is tremendous. Most are small local businesses and obviously in these hard times they cannot contribute large sums. There’s a feeling that out there, there are people or bodies who could contribute say £1,000 or £2,000, and we don’t have many sponsors at that level at the moment.
“We’re looking at marketing because of raising the profile of the festival. We don’t want to raise our ticket prices because one of the great aspects of the festival is you can see some fantastic performances at reasonable prices, so we need to instead be looking at increasing audience sizes.”
The festival is assured for 2012 but always needs support from the local community to continue thriving. Bob said, “It is quite an organisation to keep going. We have 100 volunteers without which, the festival couldn’t possibly work financially.”
