2025 Ticketing Note from the Treasurer

TL;DR: Our recommended ticket price for 2025 is $185. This increase from $170 in 2024 reflects vendor cost increases, recouping past major investments (e.g. Ring Road), larger art grants, a buffer against uncertainty including economic conditions, and a need to rebuild operating reserves to weather future challenges.

Hello all,

Quick note from the Treasurer on where our ticketing price increase comes from this year. Last year, our suggested ticket price was $170, and this year we are increasing the suggested ticket price to $185.

For the most of the past five years, Firefly has operated at a loss for a variety of reasons. In 2022, we restarted the event after two years without a Firefly and many key services, such as medical contracting and insurance, had become much more expensive. In 2023, historic rains led to a Federal emergency declaration and the current event site needed a lot of work to make it suitable for the event. In 2024, we undertook a very costly capital expenditure which will recoup its costs over time. Our goal has always been to have one full year’s expenses in reserve, which we have not maintained. This fund is exactly the sort of thing that allows us to manage unexpected disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 flooding and other last minute event challenges.

We have consistently targeted art grants as being 25-30% of our overall budget; this year nearly $70,000 is allocated to fund Firefly community art.  While this is our single largest budget item, we feel that it is critical to not compromise on expanding the creation of art of all sizes for Firefly.

Our Financial Transparency Reports for 2023 and 2024 have now been published on our Transparency site, allowing a retrospective of Firefly budgets since 2013.  With new tracking tools, we plan to increase the fidelity of this reporting starting in 2025.

We love Pay What You Can! We think the PWYC model is an important part of our mission as an arts organization and in making the burn accessible to people who want to attend. It makes budgeting and planning challenging though, because revenue is not entirely predictable. We have observed a continued year-over-year decline in PWYC percentage against target costs. Last year, we only received 90% of our ticket ask: $153 on average when the suggested ticket price was $170. This may be due to poor communication about last year’s increase being due to elimination of separate parking passes, but this is also one of the uncertainty factors that affects our suggested ticket price for 2025. If you can, please consider giving a few extra dollars to help other Fireflies attend! We really want to see our PWYC model continue to succeed.

Some increasing cost can be absorbed by expanding the number of tickets, but as scale increases, the logistical difficulty of running the event increases alongside it. Additionally, addressing issues seen by the community (such as our new portable toilet vendor this year, who we are working with to increase accessibility at the event!) often incurs further costs.

We would also like to acknowledge the many generous donations from the community. We received a particularly large number last year in support of our infrastructure project, for which we are very grateful. We do not have a consistent history of receiving donations like this, so we typically do not account for donations in our ticket pricing. Please consider a donation to Firefly this year, especially if you have an employer matching program!  As a 501(c)(3) organization, non-ticket donations to Firefly are tax deductible.

The Finance Committee (treasurer@fireflyartscollective.org) does its best to balance our goals with our costs and advises the Clusters and Cores on this as the budget for the year is made. We are working to revamp our financial management efforts to keep up with our level of complexity, and part of that is better accounting and budgeting. We hope that you all understand what we are doing, its challenges, and are willing to help us make a sustainable event!

See you in the woods,

Tristan

Treasurer of Firefly Arts Collective