Just two months after the 2014 North Carolina Holiday Flotilla, the flotilla committee reconvened to begin planning the 2015 festival.
The committee members began by identifying the 2014 festival’s successes and areas in need of improvement.
Chairman Pres Davenport said he learned plenty during his first year as president. Davenport came to the meeting with a proposal that would restructure the committee to spread the workload more equally and ensure no aspects of the planning were neglected.
The committee members agreed Festival in the Park, the Friday night launch party and the fireworks were extremely successful, but wished the boat parade had more entrants.
“I was disappointed in that we didn’t have more boats. To some degree that’s something we can handle and to some degree that’s out of our control,” Davenport said, adding several of the usual participants were out of town and several more cancelled at the last minute.
Committee member Linda Brown pointed out there was less lag time between boats in the 2014 parade than in past years, which made it appear even shorter than it actually was.
Part of Davenport’s new committee structure was designed to put more emphasis on boat recruitment. Rather than having one person in charge of the entire boat parade, Davenport proposed breaking boat parade logistics and boat recruitment into two separate subcommittees.
New committee member Quentin Jones said, as an associate broker for Nest Realty Wilmington, he has established connections with boat owners in the Wrightsville Beach area so he would be a helpful asset in the boat recruitment process.
Davenport said a key factor in successful boat recruitment was the lure of a grand prize, and therefore he named fundraising as the main area the committee needed to improve upon in 2015.
“Looking into the year ahead, the biggest thing we need to focus on is sponsorship,” he said. “We need to get on that early and often and the sooner we get that taken care of everything else falls into place.”
In 2014, the flotilla introduced a new charity element to the grand prize and title sponsorship. CastleBranch, PPD and McGladrey raised $10,000, of which $4,000 benefitted the flotilla and $6,000 will be donated to D.C. Virgo’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) program. However, the details of the sponsorship were not finalized and revealed until November.
“I’d like to see us give that even more of a push this year,” Davenport said. “We sort of dipped our toe in the water last year and saw some success from that.”
The discussion then turned to other various ways to improve the festival in general. Committee member John Andrews suggested creating a brochure to hand out at Festival in the Park with the history of the flotilla, a map of the boat parade and best places to watch. Several members also stressed the importance of self-promotion in the months leading up to the festival.
email [email protected]
