Meet Liana, manager and pro planner at Codrington Farmers’ Market

Meet Liana, manager and pro planner

To celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, manager Liana Palmer and a team of volunteers planned fun-filled Canada Day events at Codrington Farmers’ Market in Brighton, Ontario.

The market hosted a Canada Day Ethnic Food Festival that featured Greek, Mexican, Russian and South African food samples and an art exhibit. The food sampling was organized by a market volunteer named Dorothy Fletcher.

There was free face painting for the kids, live music, complimentary cups of coffee and of course the regular market vendors.

“We were lucky because the weather was perfect,” Liana says.

So how did it all come together behind the scenes?

Thanks to their careful planning, the celebration was super successful with about 500 people who attended the market on July 2.

“I could not have done it without Dorothy and her husband,” says Liana.

Liana and volunteer Dorothy broke down the planning process:

Step 1 – Develop and write a plan for the event. Make sure you keep vendors in the loop right from step 1.

Step 2 – Create posters, flyers, lawn signs, door signs, and a newsletter to be distributed locally before the event and shared on social media. Consider printing a variation of sizes of the poster – some smaller sizes can be distributed by vendors at the market or put in shopping bags as bag-stuffers. Local businesses usually don’t mind displaying posters for the local market. This is when you should also get in touch with a local media outlet (either newspaper, radio station, or television station) to advertise the upcoming event. (This can often be done for free but Codrington Farmers’ Market did pay for their ad.) Liana says it was as easy as going to a local radio station to record the ad, which aired multiple times.

(Check out Codrington Farmers’ Market’s poster here.)

Step 3 – Create a floor plan. When you have an idea of what the event will look like, create a floor plan to help you visualize where different attractions will be located: Where will the face painting station be? Where will the live music be? How many vendors will be inside and how many vendors will be outside?

Step 4 – Advertise on social media and at the market before the event. Get people pumped up about what your market is planning!

Step 5 – Take some photos during the event to share on social media afterwards. It’s not a bad idea to share a social media post about the success of your event when it’s all finished.

Here are some other useful tips from Liana and Dorothy:

Liana said they did not assemble an official planning committee but she recommends that other managers do so because it will make event planning much easier if the workload can be split among many volunteers. There are many roles to assign, like vendor-committee liaison, person in charge of local media advertising, social media campaigner to promote the event and poster creator. In this case, Dorothy’s husband created the posters.
Plan about 5 hours that can be spent on meetings and communications with the committee during the planning process. Liana and her volunteers started planning for the event about 3 weeks in advance.
Set aside about 4 hours for shopping and gathering materials for promoting the event and then distributing them – for example, printing the posters, lawn signs, etc.
Take into account how long it will take to successfully plan an event at your market. Include everything from designing the poster to promoting the event on social media to advertising at a local media outlet. Liana and Dorothy say it took about 25 hours to develop and write the plan, create the poster, flyers, lawn signs and door signs, write the e-newsletter and floor plan.
Codrington Farmers’ Market had one of their regular sponsors help fund the event. Liana said it is be ideal to have one to help cover the costs. The entire cost for the festival was about $1000. Looking back, Liana says it would have been a good idea to charge people about $2 for the face painting service since they paid a face painter to attend the event.
Food sampling does not have to be free. Liana said many customers were prepared to pay for the samples.