A Stage On Our Lawn, pt. 2

Let’s see, where did we leave off?

It’s August, 2007. Lyndzapalooza (LP) has a Board of Directors, a to-do list over a hundred lines long, and isn’t planning on having another festival for nine months.

It was a strange position to be in – all of this person-power, tons of bright ideas, and nothing tangible on the horizon for an entire pregnancy worth of time.

Yet, if we really wanted to evolve, LP had to be about more than just the tangible. We started three parallel initiatives that would help us understand our roles and what we were trying to accomplish as an organization.

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The first task – a communications survey – was primarily my job.

It sounds like such a dorky task, and… well… if you’re not me maybe it is dorky. But, it was also crucially important, because in our post-mortem we realized that we didn’t know all that much about the LP audience, other than that they liked music.

What sort of music did they like? How frequently did they go out to see it? Did they enjoy Lyndzapalooza, or just come out of some sense of duty?

I spent a month working with the Board to devise a incisive list of questions that participants could whiz through in twelve minutes or less. I did a competitive analysis of survey services. I coded all of the answers so Lindsay could make groovy charts out of them.

We learned a lot about our audience. They wanted even more genres of music – especially classic rock! They liked to buy drinks and t-shirts, but they were mostly interested in music. And, they were open to coming to more than one of our shows every year.

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The second task we undertook together, because it was about defining LP and defining ourselves: we needed a mission statement, and job titles!

A mission statement was of key importance to us. “Lyndzapalooza” had always been synonymous with “birthday party,” even though it was really only that for the first year or two of its life. Yet, even at the Evolve festival we kept hearing “happy birthday Lindsay” from the bands – even bands who were new to the festival! We needed to attached a firm definition to the evolved LP, or else it would always just be a birthday party.

After some deliberation we arrived – quite unanimously – at the following

Lyndzapalooza celebrates diverse music, creative community, and equal-opportunity expression.

It’s not a typical mission statement, I suppose. It doesn’t come right out and say “presenting new music to audiences.” But, LP has never really been just that. It’s been about bringing together a staggeringly wide range of musicians and fans together to enjoy music. And I think the statement definitely says that.

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The third task was planning our first farm-based music festival, and tomorrow I’ll tell you how we got from there to having a stage on our lawn, rather in in our cornfield.

Until then, you can purchase or reserve tickets on the web at TicketLeap. And, trust me, you’re never going to get a chance to see these fourteen artists on a single lawn ever again.