Covington Days was full of surprises for Karla Slate, the city’s community relations coordinator who helped plan the Seafair-sanctioned festival.

For example, volunteers ran out of prizes children could get when they redeemed tickets they collected playing games in the Kids Zone not once, not twice but three times, Slate said. The amount of revenue brought in by selling tickets for that element of the festival was considerably higher than she anticipated.

“I was expecting $600 or $700,” Slate said. “But we brought in around $3,500 in ticket sales for the Kids Zone.”

Generally speaking the surprising elements of the two day festival in July in the parking lot of Kohl’s were pleasant, which made the work city staff put into the event during the four months they had to plan it worth the effort, Slate said.

The festival kicked off with the parade that had 45 entries with the route being a bit longer this year, coming down Southeast 272nd Street and ending in the downtown business core, Slate said. It terminated not far from the site of Covington Days.

“It was pretty busy as the parade ended,” Slate said. “Most people felt like just by looking that there was a significantly higher turnout of spectators and those spectators definitely came to the festival right afterward.”

And as spectators wandered around the festival grounds, Slate said, they got the chance to see a larger number of booths representing a wide variety of vendors. Slate said there were 52 vendors in 2012, according to the list she had, while there were 92 this year.

“In past years we’ve heard from attendees and even vendors themselves that they felt like the event was getting too commercial,” Slate said. “People want to attend a festival like that for arts and crafts booths and more interactive booths so that was our goal when we were seeking vendors. Within our policies we created a limit for each different type of vendor. We actually sold out of commercial vendor spaces about two months before the festival and had a waiting list.

The purpose of the waiting list was if we didn’t fill all of our other slots that we would be able to offer slots to them but we didn’t have to do that.”

This led to another pleasant surprise. Part of the challenge of putting on the event this year was to find as much support as possible to defray the city’s costs. Once the commercial booths were sold out, Slate said, it presented an opportunity.

“It helped generate a few more sponsors because there is, at a certain sponsorship level … a free booth,” Slate said. “The commercial vendors turnout was really good. It’s hard to limit that revenue but we felt like it was a good decision.”

In terms of revenue and sponsorship support, Slate said, the vendor booth spaces and Kids Zone ticket sales brought in more than $10,000 combined while sponsorship dollars came to about $10,000 in cash but considerably more through in kind donations. It did not entirely cover the city’s expenses but she felt like that it laid a good foundation for future planning.

“Because the festival was an unbudgeted decision to start coordinating it I think we were trying to be very conservative with our expenses,” Slate said. “I feel like sometimes maybe we were being a little too conservative. We obviously did better than we thought we could do. It was just so much busier than we thought so we were short handed. That’s one of the lessons that I learned is that it takes so many more people to pull off an event like that. We did well but we could have done better. Those are things we will fine tune over the next few events.”

Now there is a baseline for planning Covington Days, Slate said.

So next year the work will focus on bringing in more sponsors, particularly multi-year sponsorship agreements, as well as finding more volunteers and fine tuning traffic flow as well as parking. Slate said they will have a much more refined plan when it comes to the latter two points when staff approach Kohl’s again for using the site next year.

“Another lesson learned is you have to be completely flexible and expect the unexpected,” Slate said.

Feedback, thus far, has been largely positive, Slate said. Those who attended the festival seemed to enjoy the fact there were more arts and crafts vendors, something the planning committee focused on broadening, and there was considerable positive comments about the parade specifically the new route was well received.

Vendors are already contacting Slate to get on the list for next year. Those who didn’t necessarily sell products told Slate it was a good opportunity to connect with potential customers for their services.

There were also some things to think about in terms of layout of the festival in the parking lot, Slate said, and selection of food vendors as there were some overlap in menus.

Planning for the 2014 Covington Days festival will begin soon, Slate said.

“Our first course of action will be plotting out the site again to determine what things did work and didn’t work and rearranging to figure out how more vendors we could fit, what we should add and remove as well as a traffic and parking plan,” Slate said. “Once we have that figured out so we know we aren’t going to have any problems we’ll move back into connecting with our sponsors and finding new sponsors and connect with vendors because there’s already several chomping at the bit to fill out applications. And it will definitely help to have an additional six months to plan.”

Slate plans to send out a survey to vendors soon but would love feedback from others. She would also appreciate it if folks would consider volunteering next summer.

“It really was a lot of work but it was a lot of fun,” Slate said. “I’m excited to start planning the next one.”