Planning new festival a team effort

Around a long conference table in downtown Shawano, volunteers gather over bottles of cold Sun Drop Soda to work on a big idea with seemingly a hundred details that require attention.

From the group’s efforts, a new community tradition could be born.

The big idea is Sun Drop Dayz, a two-day outdoor festival named for Shawano’s signature soft drink and conceived as a summer kickoff event to rival anything found in the surrounding area.

The inaugural Sun Drop Dayz is scheduled for June 2-3, and organizers are keenly aware that they have just two months left to arrange every last detail surrounding the entertainment, food, security and other components involved in creating a major new event from scratch.

“We’ve come a long way,” organizer Wendy Crawford said. “But we still have a lot to go.”

The festival, which organizers hope to make an annual event, is being planned to include two days of live music, food and beer vendors, children’s games, a petting zoo, arts and crafts, and many other activities. Based along Elizabeth Street near Main Street, the festival will spill over into surrounding downtown areas.

The idea of the festival was to establish a way of ushering in the summer season as a bookend alongside the longstanding end-of-summer blowout that is the Shawano County Fair.

Sun Drop Dayz was conceived last year by Leadership Shawano County, a group organized annually by the Shawano Country Chamber of Commerce to brainstorm about civic improvements. Implementing the festival idea has grown into such a large endeavor over the past several months that members of last year’s leadership group have returned to help this year’s group pull it off.

Jeff Ballwahn, a volunteer who is chairman of the organizing effort, said he feels a sense of commitment to follow through on the proposal and help to make the event a success.

“There’s an awful lot of people involved in this,” Ballwahn said. “You don’t want to let them down.”

Organizers have ambitions to grow Sun Drop Dayz into a tourist attraction on the scale of jumbo-sized events that draw crowds every year to other communities in the region.

For now, however, they are pouring all their energy into making sure the festival’s first incarnation goes off without a hitch.

Shawano City Clerk Karla Duchac, another volunteer, said she is helping the current Leadership Shawano County group because she wants to demonstrate that Shawano is capable of producing a major community festival just like Appleton and others nearby cities. Duchac said she is happy to see months of planning starting to gel into a cohesive blueprint.

“It is coming along very well,” she said. “All of us are more than willing to put in the extra time.”

The core planning group includes about two dozen volunteers who have divided up the work into specific areas, including logistics, security, fundraising and marketing, among others. Committees focused on each area meet every week, and the oversight organizing group meets every two weeks.

The group gathered March 28 around a conference table inside the Sun Drop Soda museum to pore over their plans with maps, binders and, yes, plenty of cold Sun Drop on hand. On the agenda for the day were such issues as hiring private security, renting portable restrooms, promoting the festival on social media, and choosing which brands of beer to offer for sale.

Dan Hartwig, president of Sun Drop bottler Twig’s Beverage Inc., said he is pleased to be lending the Sun Drop name to the event. Hartwig and his family also are working with organizers to make it a success.

Hartwig said he envisions Sun Drop being part of the festival into the foreseeable future.

“I think it’ll be good for the community — everybody working together for a good cause,” he said.

Proceeds of the festival will be shared with nonprofit partners that this year include the Boys & Girls Club of Shawano and Junior Achievement of Wisconsin-Wolf River Region.

Organizers believe planning for the event in subsequent years will get a little easier, as volunteers build on the experience they are gaining this year.

Crawford, the chamber of commerce’s program manager for Leadership Shawano County, said she expects some of the same volunteers will be back next year, especially if the inaugural event is a success.

“Something tells me there will be a lot of familiar faces around the table again,” she said.