Thanks for all of your support during Main Street Christmas 2011. This year we were more intentional than ever about setting clear and aggressive goals around our Christmas event. W have been running Main Street Christmas for 4 years and we feel as though this year was better than ever. We had thousands come through our doors again this year, and we are beginning to see Main Street become a well known Burlington wide event for families. We know that many people look forward to the first weekend in December.
This year our first goal was to ensure that the Gospel was clearly presented in at least 6 different areas of Main Street. Thanks to key workers like Emily Johnson, Barb Vollkick, and our amazing Kids choir we were able to meet this goal. From the background music, to the varied performances throughout Main Street, visitors would have noticed that this was a Christmas event with Christ at the center rather than the secular influences which are so pervasive elsewhere.
We also planned to have 200 volunteers serving together this year with 50 of them being brand new to our event. We are excited to report that we had over 200 volunteers and believe it or not, more than 50 of them had never served here before! Thanks again for all who came out. Our prayer is that these events become an opportunity to connect with others in our church family.
Because we want Main Street to expand its influence in our community, we also had a goal to engage at least 10 different community partners who would help us in some way this year. A few weeks ago we sent 14 letters to organizations who supported us. We also gave several local non-profit organizations an opportunity during our event to share what they were doing in our community.
We also had a goal to see 1500 invited guests come through our doors and we had plans for keeping track of these numbers. This was a difficult goal to measure. Our ballots this year gave us a better picture than we have ever been able to establish of how many of our guests were from Compass Point and how many were not from our church. We found that of those who attended the performances, 45% identified themselves as guests to Compass Point, 25% said that our church was their home, and 30% of the Ballots were unclear (didn’t identify either way). Unfortunately our attempts at counting overall attendance did not work as we expected, and in the end we have had to estimate these numbers. We believe with this year’s weather we exceed past events in terms of overall numbers, and we believe that we saw more than 3000 people attend. Although we can not say with certainty that we achieved our goal of 1500 invited guests, we were extremely encouraged by the percentages, and we feel that many if not most of our Compass Point Family brought friends to this years event.
We also wanted to see a return of 35% of our overall budget, which is extremely difficult given this event’s free admission. By engaging companies who donated product, and giving people more opportunities to contribute we were able to recover 38% of what we spent.
Over all we feel this years event was a success, and it is our recommendation that we plan another Main Street Christmas 2012 with an even sharper focus and a new and fresh “look”. Since this years event we have heard quite a bit of feedback on areas we could improve, as well as encouragement for a great weekend. We value all of the input we have received, and we welcome your continued efforts to make future events even more effective and exciting. We look forward to future events and if you would like to be involved in the planning process, please don’t hesitate to connect with anyone on the Main Street team.
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