Festival Directors and Producers Eric Manegold, Frank Beaty and Brendan McDonough

Entertainment Management students learn about event planning, production and post assessment from world-class festival directors and producers, Eric Manegold, Frank Beaty and Brendan McDonough. Beaty and Manegold talked about how events such as festivals are conceived, how boards of directors are recruited and selected, how sponsorships are developed, and about the process for assessing events and providing feedback to stakeholders. They also spent considerable time discussing the complexities for producing major festivals. In so doing, they presented a framework for breaking all events down into their major systems containing specific zones of responsibility, which in turn contain components that must be addressed prior, during and or after each event. Finally, McDonough closed out the sessions with a highly engaging conversation that detailed how the ideas presented by Beaty and Manegold were more or less employed in producing the An Ri Ra Montana Irish Festival, and are being used currently to develop Butte’s upcoming mega-festival – The National Folk Festival. The National Folk Festival is expected to draw in excess of 120,000 people over a three day period in July of 2008. Butte has been awarded the festival for the next three years.