Case Study: From 1,500 to 25,000 in Attendance
Memphis Botanic Garden
Our work with Memphis Botanic Garden goes back years. When the nonprofit began to host a holiday light show, Executive Director Mike Allen knew he needed a way to increase attendance.
Listen to the full Interview with Allen and learn about Forever Ready’s work on commercials for their Holiday Wonders At The Garden event. Through Allen’s work, assisted by videos from Forever Ready, the event has grown from about 1,500 attendees annually to more than 25,000!
“What I like about Forever Ready Productions is first of all you’re good. You’re a great storyteller, you know what we say and somehow you translate that into what we want,” Allen said. “But as an Executive Director what I like is you’re quick, you turn things around in a remarkably fast way, and I think you guys deliver a really good product, really quickly at a very reasonable cost.”
Our team created a commercial for the nonprofit’s Holiday Wonders at the Garden light show. The
organization was a distant third in the city as far as holiday light displays go and it was important to
drive visitors to become members of the garden for year-round programs.
“We had more people on our opening night this year than we used to have across the whole 18 or 19
night season. We’re gonna go from 1,200, maybe 2,000 people in a year to 25,000-35,000 people. And
that’s important to us because of the revenue that it brings into the garden,” Allen said. “It’s a really
important fundraiser but it’s equally important because of the awareness that it drives. All of that we
attribute, in part, to video.”
The commercial led the organization to partnering with Forever Ready produce a video for the Memphis Botanic Garden’s latest capital campaign effort. Allen wanted it to have an emotional pull that reminded people about the beautiful space and the memories we can make at the Garden.
“Every scene you shot and image that we captured is still viable today. And we have found reasons to continue to use that video,” Allen said.
We’ve also produced an Emmy Award-winning concert at the Memphis Botanic Garden and endless videos about their various programs. Take a look at some examples below.