BowerPower Papers, a quarterly digital newsletter from Bower & Co. Consulting LLC, aims to inspire non-profit leaders and event/festival producers to think creatively about marketing, corporate sponsorship, events, and business development.
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Volume 4 Issue 2
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Summer 2009
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Dear ,
I have lots of great news for you. First, I'm thrilled to announce that I published my first book, and more importantly that I'm certain you'll find it of great value. How to Jump-start Your Sponsorship Strategy in Tough Times is loaded with ideas, recommendations, tough questions for you, and lists excellent questions you need to be discussing with your sponsors now.
If you'll be attending the Bridge Conference this week, you'll find me talking about my new book at the Bookstore after my 8:30 session Wednesday morning. I'm scheduled to do a book signing that same day at 10:30 a.m. Stop by and say hi.
Next, I also launched a blog, called Sponsorship Strategist, for both sponsorship sellers and buyers. You'll find observations, ideas, critique, and commentary about sponsorship and factors that effect it. I truly welcome your readership and participation. You can subscribe to new posts by email, through your favorite reader, or just stop by whenever you like.
My first teleseminar was a hit. If you missed it, the recording is available at my new web site store. Stay tuned for coming announcements on more teleseminars this fall.
I want to welcome all the new subscribers and everyone I met at the ANSA/NANASP Conference in Atlanta and at the TFEA conference in Fort Worth.
Finally, enjoy this issue of BowerPower Papers. You'll want to read the main article on anniversaries, and today is a big one: 40 years ago, the first person to walk on the moon took one giant leap. Cheers!
Warm regards,Gail S. Bower President 
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PEACE, LOVE & ANNIVERSARIES
by Gail S. Bower
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This year is a big year for anniversary celebrations. We honored the bicentenary of two legendary historical figures, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. The internationally acclaimed jazz festival at Newport turns 55 next month, while its companion festival, Newport Folk, turns 50.
This spring, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival turned 40, and this summer, two other noteworthy 40th celebrations will occur, one, today, honoring the first moonwalk, and in a few weeks, the other commemorating Woodstock.
Hundreds of millions of us remember where we were when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the surface of the moon and proudly proclaimed the achievement - inspired by President John Kennedy seven years earlier - "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." About a billion of us worldwide sat in front of our televisions, watching the event live, knowing we were part of an historic moment. (Check it out, if you missed it.)
Ironically, the 30th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk was eclipsed by the tragic and untimely death of President Kennedy's son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. And just weeks before the 40th, we mourned the untimely passing of another, more popular Moonwalker, Michael Jackson.
 Woodstock, on the other hand, had quite a different impact on our culture. Revered by some and reviled by others, Woodstock will always remain an iconic event, and its anniversaries provide an interesting focal point for a discussion on what makes anniversary events work. Or not.
Three key ingredients are necessary for your anniversary event's success: meaning, resonance, and strategy.
Meaning. An event or anniversary date may be important to you and your organization, even to our broader culture, but it may have little or no meaning outside of your immediate community. So first, you must create that meaning. What happened all those years ago? Why was that important at the time? What was the cultural context for that beginning, and why does that matter anymore?
 Woodstock's 25th and 30th Anniversaries lacked broader meaning for many people and suffered negative consequences: remembered as not much more than a mudfest at the 25th and rioting and violence in the latter. The later generation celebrating Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 saw the images of the first Woodstock and tried to recreate the early generation's expression of its ideas, opinions, and values. But the resultant celebrations were merely simulations of the original event, and attendees only mimicked the mythologized "free-spiritedness," connecting only with the groovy symbols and superficialities of the expression, not with the true meaning.
It's no surprise that the original producers of Woodstock have encountered difficulty finding corporate sponsors for an intended celebration event this year (according to a May 10, 2009, article in The New York Times).
A similar situation happened during a 2001 Mardi Gras celebration in Philadelphia, when 40,000 people descended on the South Street neighborhood. The event quickly became a drunken party-gone-bad, with violence and looting in the streets. Very few of the celebrants had a clue what the meaning of Mardi Gras is, preferring instead to use it as an excuse to drink and, for some, to unleash repressed behavior.
To avoid this disconnect, engage audiences to help them connect the meaning and importance of the anniversary to current day culture and to the future.
Resonance. Your marketing efforts and the anniversary event itself must provide ways for people to connect to your milestone and why it's important to them personally. Why is your event or organization's anniversary relevant today? And why should potential attendees care? Making this connection, particularly through rich storytelling, will help provide emotional resonance, which will allow your story to leave an indelible imprint in the minds and hearts of attendees.
Last year, I had the opportunity to conduct informal research about Woodstock in a project for the Bethel Woods Performing Arts Center and Museum, located on the grounds of the original music festival. Through this study, I asked people of all different ages what Woodstock meant to them. The findings are fascinating (see sidebar).
As you can see, Woodstock obviously held the most significance for those individuals in their 50s because they were of age at the time of the event. People ten years older may have been preoccupied with raising children or they were just outside the demographic group for whom Woodstock would be appealing, and the connection just wasn't there. People older than that expressed divergent impressions of Woodstock, either admiring what the event symbolized for youth at that time or finding it insulting.
Individuals in their 40s, too young to have been there but who've lived in the shadow of Woodstock, seemed to have a more refined or objective understanding of what the event meant culturally. While respondents in their 30s find little relevance, those in their 20s respond to the cool factor, and those under 20 have no clue whatsoever. (My favorite response was from a 13-year-old friend who asked if I was referring to the little yellow bird who hangs out with Snoopy.)
Building a context that provides personal connections, weaving the present with the past, and exploring the legacy of your event, festival or organization over time are important themes that should run through your anniversary celebration messages.
Strategy. Get the most mileage you can from your anniversary celebration by developing a strategy. What do you want to happen as a result of your anniversary celebration? Is it just a party? Is it a springboard for deeper engagement with your organization or event? Is the anniversary the theme and marketing hook? Or is it simply subtly woven into your current year festival? Will the anniversary be acknowledged annually or just during the milestone years? Can you connect a wider audience with your anniversary, inspiring them in a deeper way? How can you tell your story in the most compelling way to generate the results you seek?
So this evening, gaze up at the moon and consider the technological fete that the Moonwalk was. What's the story you would tell? How powerful would your anniversary celebration be?
 And don't forget the merchandising.
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HOW TO JUMP-START YOUR SPONSORSHIP STRATEGY IN TOUGH TIMES
You may recall in the last issue of BowerPower Papers that I mentioned my concerns about the chilling effect on corporate sponsorship because of legislation introduced in February. I offered a teleseminar in May, describing the current conditions and what actions I recommended that sponsorship sellers take immediately.
Well, the teleseminar led to a three-hour workshop at the Texas Festival & Event Association's conference and to a new guidebook, entitled How to Jump-start Your Sponsorship Strategy in Tough Times, providing even more detail. It's now available and ready for purchase, as is the recording of the original teleseminar. You also may visit the new store on my web site to purchase both.
If you'd like to take a test drive, I invite you to download a white paper drawn from the book, with my compliments.
From 4th of July Fireworks to annual festivals and celebrations, event leaders nationwide are having to make tough choices about their events. In some cases, those choices include scaling back or cancelling their 2009 events.
This economy is stressful and worrisome for all of us. Our annual events, cultural celebrations, and festivals are needed now more than ever to alleviate stress, bring us together, and allow us to enjoy a day or a weekend of great food, soul-stirring music, the pagentry of culture, and just plain fun.
To help preserve these events and to help nonprofit organizations struggling with their corporate sponsorship programs, I ask that you please forward information about this guidebook to people who may find it of value. Many thanks!
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SOCIAL MEDIA AND YOU
"We've got an information flood, like a fire hose in the face."
--Barry Vacker, writer, filmmaker, media theorist
Thank you to everyone who participated in the social media survey in the last issue of BowerPower Papers. Because we're all overloaded with information on a daily basis, your feedback is very important to me to ensure that the content, frequency, and format of information from Bower & Co. is of value to you.
Based on your comments, BowerPower Papers will continue as a quarterly publication, and periodically I will offer special reports and white papers. For those of you who noted you'd prefer more regular publication, like a monthly e-newsletter or a blog, here's good news. I'm pleased to officially announce my new blog, Sponsorship Strategist, which I've been adding posts to periodically over the last couple months.
I invite you to visit regularly, subscribe via your Google Reader, or through email updates. Just as important, I encourage you to join in the conversation - post your comments, your questions, your feedback. And, if it's OK with you, I'll send out reminders once in awhile, when there's something really juicy you won't want to miss.
As promised, here are the results of the survey.
· The most popular social media sites respondents use are:
- Facebook 76.3%
- LinkedIn 47.4%
- YouTube 39.5%
- Twitter 21.1%
- MySpace 13.2%
- Squidoo, Ning, Flickr 2.6%
· Most of you are not consistently reading blogs.
· Respondents to the survey noted the following reasons for using blogs and social media: easy to use and access; learning interesting things about people or the opinions of people you trust; access to information and staying "in the know"; having a conversation; networking, staying in touch with, connecting and reconnecting with people; and the business value, that they work to pull people towards your message versus pushing your messages onto people.
Views on BowerPower Papers
- 90.9% are satisfied or love the frequency of BowerPower Papers
- 100% are satisfied or love the value of the content
- 100% are satisfied or love the length of the articles
- 96.7% are satisfied or love the format, with the article in the email vs. a link to a web site
Respondents of the survey:
- 42% ED/CEO
- 34% Event Coordinator
- 18% VP or Director of Development, Marketing, other
- 2% board
- 2% producer
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Gail Bower, President, Bower & Co. Consulting LLC, specializes in
raising the visibility, revenue, and impact of non-profit
organizations and festivals/events. She's a professional consultant, writer, and speaker,
with more than 20 years of experience managing some of the country's most
important events, festivals and sponsorships. Launched in 1987, today Bower & Co. improves the results of clients marketing strategies, events, and corporate sponsorship programs. She is the author of the guidebook entitled How to Jump-start Your Sponsorship Strategy in Tough Times. For
more information, visit her web site or contact her at 1-866/36-BOWER
(1-866-362-6937).
© 2008 Gail S. Bower. All rights reserved.
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| Gail Bower Interviewed on Podcast with Pam Harper
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Earlier this summer, friend and colleague Pamela S. Harper interviewed me for her podcast series, Accelerating Progress. Have a listen to Five Steps to Sponsorship Success.
Pam, founder and president of Business Advancement Inc., is an internationally known business performance expert who helps companies accelerate progress toward their key objectives. Pam's views are based upon a combination of her education in Organizational Behavior along with 20+ years of internal and external consulting experience to entrepreneurial, mid-sized, and large companies in a variety of industries, all going through extraordinary growth and change.
Pam's articles on strategy, leadership, communication, and organizational transformation have appeared in a variety of trade association journals, Her book, Preventing Strategic Gridlock® (Cameo Publications 2003), has been used as a text in university management classes. She also co-authored a chapter of the 2001 Handbook of Business Strategy (Thomson Financial Media). A frequent radio commentator and professional speaker, Pam has also been widely quoted in a variety of popular media such as Business Week, Investor's Business Daily, and Entrepreneur magazines. Pam graduated with honors from Northwestern University, has been featured in Who's Who of American Women and Who's Who in America. She is a member of the Society for Advancement of Consulting(R) and the National Association of Corporate Directors. She is also Chair of the Saddle Brook Committee of the Association for Corporate Growth, New Jersey.
To learn more, visit her web site.
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| The Meaning of Woodstock to People Under the Age of 80
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Individuals in their 70s.
· "music festival meant to countersink rock-and-roll into the nation's conscience."
· Protest by "younger generation" against Vietnam war and political establishment.
· "Deplorable. It was the worst slap in the face one generation could give to the previous generation."
Individuals in their 60s.
· "huge cultural event that helped define a generation."
· "too involved with raising children and in bad marriages. We were probably 10 years too old. The music was not ours, and we were not free enough to be that free."
· "Freedom. No violence. Friendship."
Individuals in their 50s.
· "Huge crowds and great music. Oh, and naked people."
· "Moment in time that can't be duplicated."
· "The peace movement and my life at the time."
· "Social movement, awareness, as well as fun and experimentation, expansion."
· No lasting impression; however: "the ending of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam. It was an era of protest songs like 'Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud,' 'Smiling Faces,' and 'The Revolution Won't be Televised.' I think of reefer and acid. However, being raised in Harlem where the drug of choice was heroin, it brings back bad memories of friends dying. I remember me trying to avoid Vietnam and being shot by police. Woodstock meant people coming together."
· "A relic" and "some great, legendary performances."
Individuals in their 40s.
· "a few years before my time"
· "It doesn't mean anything for me personallY."
· "Woodstock doesn't have much impact on my thinking"
· "A big hippie event that we were too young to share in."
· Skepticism of true commitment to ideals of peace and love.
However, this group also has synthesized a sharper understanding of the meaning:
· "Start of a 'revolution'"
· "Rallying cry"
· "A literal stage for artists to use their art/celebrity to have a positive impact on the world"
· "the apex of a movement"
· Hippies still "have a positive influence to our local politics"
· "A social movement," "the crashing end of a period," "social change indeed,some of it myth and some reality," "America staggering through the ditch."
· "Pivotal point in American popular culture"
· "A passion for ideals, beliefs, almost a naïve innocence of endless possibilities."
· "Standing for something and having independent thought. I think it was about peace, which is meaningful and a great idea."
· "'Three days of peace and music.' It stands as a historic demonstration that multitudes of young people could assemble for something other than war and that art, music and optimism about a new approach to life could draw people together from all walks in peaceable communion of mind, body and spirit. Musically, it reflected the vitality, passions and tumult of the times -- for better and for worse -- and the fledgling attempt to engage large audiences with live music on a scale that mirrored the levels achieved by the mass media. Personally, it inspires as an example of a collective, progressive embrace of new values, a rejection of hostility, war and greed, and belief in the ability of each generation to lead civilization forward in a positive evolution, as opposed to being mired by ritual, tradition and the perpetuation of prevailing norms and power structures. The fact that a subsequent Woodstock anniversary ended in violence shows that mankind will slip backward into baser motivations and behaviors if not inspired or nurtured toward to collective enlightenment. The fact that fewer people protest the war in Iraq today due to the volunteer nature of the U.S. army calls into question the amount of self-preservation and self-interest as motivating factor at the original Woodstock vs. the long-term commitment to progressive ideals of peace and love. Words like noble, righteous; progressive, peaceful, passionate, enlightened come to mind on the positive side, while negatives include idealistic, naive, transient and immature."
Individuals in their 30s.
· "Big music get together somewhere on a farm in upstate NY or New England. Huge names doing music for the sake of it, not for cash. Weed, lots of weed. Peace. Very little in terms of lasting impressions or significance."
· "Hippies in the mud listening to terrible music while wasted on acid."
· "Woodstock does not really have much meaning for me."
· "It didn't have any impact on my life and is just a historical event that is somewhat symbolic of the generation and the time."
Individuals in their 20s.
"Peace and love, man. My parents were there."
"Jimi Hendrix was there."
Individuals, ages 5-20.
"You mean that little yellow bird that hangs out with Snoopy?"
"Never heard of Woodstock."
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