A replacement for TroutFest and between 1,500-2,000 visitors for the one-day event, this year’s inaugural Outdoor Days met its major goal to engage more people, with 3,700 people visiting just Cassville South Park over the three-day festival.
The city of Cassville partnered with Element 79 Media Group to host the event, which came with a total price tag of $30,000.
Outdoor Days began June 1 with The Isaacs concert at Cassville South Park, and events over the following Friday and Saturday included the Rotary Rodeo both nights and Free Swim Day and Cassville Outdoor Days Trilogy Challenge disc golf tournament on Saturday.
The city had predicted a larger audience at The Isaacs, preparing for a couple thousand and getting around 500-600, a figure that does not include people who came for the Chick-fil-A food truck and did not stay for the show.
However, Cassville Alderman Jon Horner said TroutFest drew about 1,000 people, and over the course of the weekend, more than triple that number visited South Park.
Rachael Freeman, Element 79 business development manager, said any time a new event is held, it’s tough to know what to expect.
“Any time you start a new event, you never really know,” she said. “The inaugural year is for everyone from the event coordinators to the community to see how it will play out. Because of this year, we want to add more activities next year.”
Feedback surrounding Outdoor Days has been excellent, Freeman said, with many individuals of all ages reaching out with ideas and suggestions.
“We’d like to get a baseball tournament that weekend, and we want to do a pickleball tournament, but we didn’t this year because we wanted to wait for the expanded facilities,” she said. “The Isaacs have expressed they’d like to come back, and we’d love to have them back. But, we are also looking at making that day longer and bringing in more entertainment. We’ve been getting lots of feedback, and it’s fun to see people give suggestions and how they are looking forward to next year.”
Some feedback came from those performing in the event itself. Duane Garren, a Monett-based concert emcee who does about 175 shows a year, said the event was first class.
“I can say, without hesitation, that [the] inaugural event at Cassville’s Outdoor Days was, without a doubt, the most well organized event I have worked in a long time!” he said in a post on his Facebook page. “Thank you to Tim and Robin Brodie and the entire Element 79 Media company, the City of Cassville and a host of many other volunteers for putting on a first-class event with The Isaacs! Let’s do it again next year.”
Along with the feedback, Freeman some of the best parts of the weekend were getting to know visitors to the area.
“Something I wasn’t prepared for was the interactions I got with the people picking them up in golf carts and transporting them to the show,” she said. “I heard about where they were from and how they heard about the show. There was one woman in her 90s who had never been to Cassville South Park and realized we had something so nice.
“Overall, Outdoor Days gave people more opportunities and more things to do. Some people hit all the things, and some stayed in town longer or came back to town because of the variety of things to do. I felt it was a good way to help promote all the things going on without it falling on just one group. And, it was a good way to highlight the different organizations in the community that are out there doing things for the community.”
Many local churches offered shuttle services during the concert, including: Cassville First Baptist Church, Cassville United Methodist Church, Blessing Heights Worship Center, Blessing Heights Youth Group, Emmanuel Baptist Church, Purdy Full Life Church and Solid Rock Southern Baptist Church. the Cassville Area YMCA also shuttled concertgoers.
Alongside this year’s investment in entertainment, the city, Element 79 and the Industrial Development Corporation evenly split a $15,000 annual fee for placer. ai, location intelligence and foot traffic data software that provides analytics on people’s movements in the area.
Placer collects geolocation data from mobile devices enabled to share data in anonymized fashion. Such data can then be used to better craft marketing campaigns or better understand trends within a certain geographic area.
A major goal of Outdoor Days for the city was to not only provide local residents with a new event, but also create an event that would draw people from outside of the county and north from Roaring River to capitalize on tourism tax dollars.
Freeman said the three main goals for Placer are to promote tourism, foster economic development and assist in obtaining grants.
“It covers so many different things,” she said. “Like, we can see where people are coming from and how many turn off at Seligman to go to Roaring River and never come through Cassville,” she said. “We want to know those numbers so when we make a decision, even it it’s just putting a billboard down there, those analytics can help justify that decision.
“We can also look over a full year and do marketing campaigns. We get a lot of visitors from places like Dallas and Wichita, but not as much from Tennessee. So, why aren’t people coming from that way, and what can we do to get them to visit here?”
As for economic development, reports can be used to sway possible industry to plant in Cassville, and reports can be used to more easily apply for grants.
“We’ve had some retail businesses reach out looking for information, and we can provide it to them instead of them having to research through MoDOT or track down census information,” Freeman said.
Freeman added the software does not allow users to specify who is being tracked, as location data is intentionally altered to further protect individuals’ privacy.
“There are no identifiers, and it’s all based off cell phone location services through certain apps,” Freeman said. “It shows a general area, and it is deliberately thrown off a bit, like a few blocks in some cases. it’s based more on zip code than specific location.”
Freeman said the software is backdated to 2017, and she can run a report for any area over any time period while the account is active.
From June 1-3, the city pinpointed Cassville South Park with the Placer product, which says the area receives about 120,000 visitors per year, or 330 per day. Freeman said the detailed report required use of a Placer account representative and about a three-day turnaround from request to fulfillment.
About 3,700 people visited the park over the three-day window, which included the concert by The Isaacs on June 1 and Free Swim Day and Cassville Outdoor Days Trilogy Challenge disc golf tournament on June 3. On average, visitors to the park were there for just over two hours, and peak visit times were 10 a.m. at about 1,200 visitors and and 7 p.m. at about 1,500 visitors.
Thursday showed about 1,800 total visitors to the park, about 500 came on Friday and Saturday was the biggest draw at about 2,200.
Using the Placer software to look back at TroutFest, 1,600 were in the park the day of the 2021 event, held in September with no adjacent event. In 2022, a total of 2,800 visited the park, as TroutFest coincided with free swim day and a youth baseball tournament also at the park.
One of the most useful features of Placer is the “Favorite Places” category, detailing where visitors went before and after going to the park.
Of the 3,700 Outdoor Days visitors, about 1,100 went to Cassville Plaza (Dollar Tree, Westco and Tractor Supply) or Walmart, 478 went to Bill Hailey Arena, 322 went to SONiC Drive-In and 304 went to McDonald’s.
Data also shows from where park visitors arrived and where they went after. For example, 2.1 percent of park visitors, about 77 people, were at BBQ Station prior to visiting the park, and 3.1 percent, about 115 people, came from Walmart.
Post-park visit beneficiaries were clearly Walmart, at 5.9 percent or 218 people; SONIC, at 3.2 percent or 118 people; and McDonald’s, at 2.7 percent or 100 people.
Data also showed most of the visitors within a few miles radius were not Cassville residents. The largest portion of visitors hailed from northwest of Exeter.
Statistics also delved into socioeconomic status, and comparing to the state. Of the 3,700 visitors, the median household income was $52,500, 20.1 percent had bachelor’s degrees or higher, the median age was 36.9 and there was an average of 2.51 persons per household. These demographics are based on capturing 70 percent of visits to the area.
A final feature shows the routes individuals took to arrive at the park, with most coming south on Highway 37 to Business 37. East on Highway 76, north on Highway 37 and North on Highway 112 all saw similar but lesser traffic, and west on Highway 248 and Highway 76 shared figures again lower
