By Shirley Thom
So many small and medium-size businesses and long-term events have experienced anxiety in this dreadful year of 2020. The arrival of COVID-19 and the unknown duration of its effects leave us wondering what do we need to do to keep our dreams of serving our customers alive and keep our non-profit effort prospering? I’m on the Board of Directors of the Seattle Moisture Festival of Comedy-Variete’. Let me tell you about our particular event.
For 16 years, the Moisture Festival had presented a month-long variety arts festival in March and April at Hale’s Palladium and other Seattle venues, without interruption. One week before our 17th season began, we shut down the 2020 festival, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We had 49 ticketed events planned for the 2020 festival, with many prepaid tickets sold, all of which had to be canceled and refunded.
Each year, one full-time employee and three part-time employees, plus 250 volunteers, put months of their time into organizing producers and technicians and gathering local, national and international performers to put on this fanciful event. The performers are fed, housed and offered transportation while they are in Seattle. At the end of the season, when all the bills are paid, our artists get paid a small per-person performance honorarium. It is an artist’s cooperative in which there are no superstars, just working artists offering up wonderful afternoons and evenings of pure entertainment to our local community. Approximately 12,000 attend the Moisture Festival each year. How do we keep them engaged when we miss a year—or perhaps even two years—of entertaining them?
Based on our mission, our pricing allows young families, seniors and persons from all walks of life to attend. The Moisture Festival has a non-profit 501C3 status. We are following our usual course of soliciting donations through personal contacts, grants, Go Fund Me campaigns, Give Big and our website at www.moisturefestival.org. But a “usual course” is not enough to keep us engaged with our fans when there are no live performances for them to enjoy.
We’ve added virtual events, using social media platforms to promote new online performances, produced by festival artists and partners.
- We have twice-a-month podcasts: “The Moisture Festival Podcast,” featuring interviews with festival artists, producers and people who work behind the scenes, for a unique look at the Moisture Festival and its history.
https://moisturefestivalpodcast/
- We produce and stream two online shows per month, featuring a combination of archival footage of the festival, plus new video material from our artists.
https://www.youtube.com/user/MoistureFest
We present every kind of variety artists: acrobats, comedians, Bubble Magic, an acrobatic archer who shoots bow and arrow targets with her bare feet, jugglers, aerial artists, dancers, and others, who donate their time to keep our unique festival top-of-mind.
All this is very hard work and it keeps us super busy—but We Love It! Will you join us to help keep this dream alive and keep the variety arts entertaining Seattle?
Shirley Thom is a publicist for the Moisture Festival and author of Life Is a Sales Job. You can reach her at shirley@moisturefestival.org.