'Overwhelming' support brought more people, more money to One Spark 2015

Business

More people and more money.

That was the top story of One Spark 2015 as explained Monday morning by Elton Rivas, co-founder and CEO of Jacksonville’s crowdfunding festival.

He said based on ridership figures for the Skyway and the ground shuttles, the number of VIP packages sold this year, food, beverage and official festival merchandise sales and the number of times the festival’s voting app was downloaded, an estimated 320,500 people attended the festival.

The estimate last year was 260,000.

“It’s absolutely amazing,” said Rivas. “The community support is overwhelming.”

Michael Munz, One Spark board member, attributed the increase in attendance to the festival establishing a larger market base for its third year. He said last week proved people who live in the suburbs and who don’t usually visit Downtown will come if they have a reason.

The 2015 event was a promotional opportunity for Downtown, as well as for the more than 500 registered exhibitors.

“From an experience standpoint, we were able to showcase what Downtown could and should be in the future,” said Munz, a Dalton Agency executive vice president and partner.

One of the changes for 2015 was the debut of $15,000 juried awards given in each of six project categories. The top vote-getters in each category also received a $15,000 bonus.

In addition to the festival’s $350,000 in guaranteed cash awards, attendees contributed $93,324.45 to projects, a 75 percent increase in personal contributions compared to One Spark 2014.

Improvements to the One Spark app and the festival’s Wi-Fi helped attendees vote and contribute more this year, Rivas said. After some issues during the first few hours of voting, the system operated as expected, an improvement compared to 2013 and 2014.

“We had no downtime due to bandwidth load or volume on the system,” said Rivas.

Crowdfunding campaigns for 229 exhibitors will continue for about 30 days at onespark.com, which will increase the 2015 contribution total.

The next step for festival organizers will be conducting surveys of attendees, entrants, sponsors, vendors and venues to gather feedback and determine what, if any, changes will be made for 2016.

Munz doesn’t anticipate any major adjustments.

“We’re in refinement mode. We’ll be tweaking,” he said.

Could there be another international edition of One Spark, similar to the one staged Sept. 12-13 in Berlin? While there have been many inquiries from other cities, both in the U.S. and abroad, Rivas said there are no plans at this time to present One Spark anywhere other than where it debuted in 2013.

“Jacksonville is the focus,” he said.

Munz said the future of One Spark in Jacksonville is “solid” and the city will be the festival’s “home base” in 2016.

One aspect that will remain is the concept behind the festival that allows people with ideas and products to interact with people who might make a small contribution to a project during One Spark – or even invest a larger sum to support more long-term success.

“One Spark will remain focused on connecting ideas to resources,” said Rivas.

The most major change in One Spark 2015 compared to the previous two years was deciding at about 3:30 p.m. Sunday to move the closing ceremony away from Hemming Park to the Moran Theater in the Times-Union Center due to rain.

Rivas said Monday he’s not sure if organizers could have handled the change of venue, just 90 minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, as easily without the benefit of experience.

“It did work out very well,” he said. “If we had had to do that the first year, it wouldn’t have gone so smoothly.”