Measuring Success of Goodwill Arts Festival

In hindsight, it is hard to measure the the impact and success of the Goodwill Arts Festival. In the official report about the Goodwill Arts Festival, Peter Davis predicted that “the greatest value of the festival was probably personal. The key to its impact is found in the level of participation by the community and in the personal connections that were fostered.”¹ The impact of the festival was immeasurable because it fostered connections between people that could not be quantified. The Goodwill Arts Festival did not have the everlasting impact the organizers hoped that it would. The apparent success of the festival made organizer “Norman Langill think one could take place every two years; [while] Goodwill Arts Festival co-chair Paul Schell thinks it might be once every three years, but both see a green light for some kind of regular festival in the future.”² This never happened, and an arts exchange on the scale of the Goodwill Arts Festival did not become a regular event in Seattle. There were also financial difficulties caused because of the festival. For example, the Seattle Opera struggled “to raise the 1.2 million War and Peace cost.”³ The Goodwill Arts Festival suffered from financial strains, and, ultimately, did not live up to the expectations making an international arts festival a biannual tradition.

Above is a text analysis of the Goodwill Arts Festival Report, compiled by Anne Focke, after the festival had concluded