IGNITE!

On monday night, the youth panel decided on our timeline for the rest of this year. WOW! Lots to do, not much time! :)

We’re really excited to see you all at auditions on March 8 _ 9. Audition results will be sent out March 17th, and after we get confirmation from performers, you’ll start hearing about the exciting 2014 performers right here on the blog! Our line-up should be live by March 31st (watch this page!!). We couldn’t be more excited to see who we’re working with this year.

You will also start seeing ads up for IGNITE! all over Vancouver through the next few months. A transit shelter ad running from March 31st through April 30th should help us get the message out. Posters around the city _ postcards handed out are also going to help us but in the end, as always, we rely on you to tell your friends. We know that word-of-mouth is our #1 promoter and we thank you for that!!

A surprising stat from our survey - 16% of respondents would be stoked to hop up (all alone!) on stage to participate, and 64% would be likely to so long as they were in a group. Wow! We’d love to have all of you on stage with us. :)

Reminder that if you’d like to participate in a big way (aka perform) - contact us at [email protected] before Feb 24th.

The final nugget from our survey? Our most successful promotion is word of mouth, so please, tell your friends about us!

Survey results say - females are more likely to attend IGNITE! (or more likely to fill out surveys). Kidding aside, we asked for answers this fall, and got some interesting ones.

- We learned that respondents loved the fruit basket and music components of IGNITE! most.

- We might need to re-vamp our workshops, because overall those who attended rated it above average, but about half our respondents didn’t attend them.

- We got overwhelmingly positive responses! Only 0.5% of our responses rated an offering as “a foul stench” (aka 1 out of 195!) Thanks!! In comparison, we got 30% top marks. We love you too!

We did have somewhere you could request what you’d like to see more of, and we’d like to share a couple responses we got.

"Drunken bear fire parkour"
“ALL THE THINGS”
“more cowbells”

(some more serious and specific responses as well, which we will take into consideration)

Tomorrow - find out the stat that surprised us all…

What an existential question…

We came up with a few answers, but are also curious to know what you think!

* A youth festival should be creative, inspiring, fun, supportive, respectful, yet stimulating.
* A youth festival should engage/inspire all participants. Yay.
* A youth festival should be vibrating, exciting, a group of people coming together having a gay-old time.
* A youth festival should be an organized space that facilitates and promotes an enlightening and engaging creative environment.

A common theme for us when having this brainstorming session, was community. We discussed what communities we are a part of, what community means to us, and how we can build community. We’ll be doing some community engagement events leading up to our festival, and if you watch this blog we’ll let you know when we book them. :)

The IGNITE! youth panel has been meeting every monday since early October, planning and preparing for the 2014 IGNITE! youth fest.

What have we been doing with all that time? WELL…

- brainstormed what a youth festival should include
- made goals for our personal experience with IGNITE! this year
- made a poster called “Steps For Success”
- did some research on other festivals around town
- made a survey to see how we did last year
- created committee’s
- decided on a festival theme
- discussed branding
- created a website
- created an audition/submission postcard sized flyer
- planned where to distribute flyers
- brainstormed community events
- created a budget

Over the next few days I’ll be delving deeper into some of these subjects - stay tuned! We’ll also be sharing a story of how we delivered a gift in a very creative way… true IGNITE! style.