12 JACKSONVILLE BUSINESS JOURNAL APRIL 8, 2016

ONE SPARK TIMELINEMarch 2012: One Spark’s predecessor, the Epoch Project, announced

June 2012: One Spark announced, and is pitched as a scaled-back version of the Epoch Project

April 2013: One Spark hosts its inaugural event, with Rethreaded, The Wall, the Fathom Sphere and Tiger Trail winning in their respective categories

August 2013: One Spark founder Elton Rivas announces crowdfunding accelerator, Kyn, in which Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s Stache Investments says it will invest $1 million

March 2014: One Spark Berlin is announced

April 9, 2014: Rivas, Laura Street Trio developer Steve Atkins announce plans for an innovation center in the Barnett Building

April 9-13, 2014: One Spark 2014 is held with about 260,000 attendees

May 2014: A former FSCJ professor’s study of One Spark reveals a third of one percent of creators reached fundraising goals

September 2014: Stache Investments’ chief investment o� icer Jim Zsebok leaves organization

September 12-13, 2014: One Spark Berlin is held

October 2014: Stache pulls funding out of Kyn

December 2014: Former One Spark executive director and COO Joe Sampson resigns

April 2015: One Spark 2015 is held

June 2015: One Spark sta� reduced from 11 sta� members to four

August 2015: One Spark board members announce the 2016 festival will take place over three days instead of six

January Elton Rivas steps down

February Two additional sta� members – Lorrae Famiglietti and Gabby Staton – step down

February: One Spark COO Chris Byers announces One Spark will be a one-day event held at Art Walk

April: Spark Walk 2016

earlier this year. Problems began popping up earlier, though, from the collapse of One Spark off shoot Kyn to the fl ash-in-the-pan nature of One Spark Berlin.

Former staff members will point to those events as evidence of how the organization was making missteps. In the wake of the collapse of Elton Rivas’ spinoff Kyn, for example, fi ngers were pointed at the lack of funding the orga-nization actually provided to the startups it was meant to be mentoring.

When Shad Khan’s Stache Investments pulled its funding from Kyn in October 2014, Khan’s spokesman said only 12 percent of Kyn’s funding went toward the program’s six participants. Khan had initially pledged $1 million to the group.

Rivas’ decision to take One Spark to Berlin, meanwhile, was originally pegged as a play to become a global brand that could see the organization expanding into Australia, South Africa and Brazil. While the event was hailed as a success, it didn’t lead anywhere — in part because

of what one former employee said was “bad information” about possible corpo-rate sponsorships with big names in the tech industry that never came to fruition.

SPONSORSHIP STRUGGLECorporate sponsorships could have made One Spark fi nancially viable, and in 2014, ramping those up was something that some involved in One Spark say the lead-ership team was close to.

� at trigger never got pulled, though.One Spark board member Michael

Munz said One Spark simply needed – and still needs – more time to build up sponsorships.

“I think it just takes time for events like this,” Munz said. “We are so diff erent and unique – there’s nothing like this in the country.”

In terms of successes, Munz cited the Microsoft BizSpark sponsorship, which will give the top three creators at One Spark’s creator innovation day a month-ly $750 credit to use on Azure Cloud ser-vices, as evidence of progress.

But things like that pale in comparison

to the amount of money the event costs to put on.

Without reaching the sponsorship lev-el needed, One Spark faced heavy loss-es, and continued to rely on patron Peter Rummell’s backing. In comparison to Rummell’s contributed $3.5 million, One Spark raised $1.3 million in corpo-rate sponsorships – about a sixth of the cost of operating for three years.

NORTHERN INSPIRATIONWhile One Spark faltered in making the transition from philanthropy to fi scal via-bility, the festival it modeled itself after was able to navigate that switch.

Located a little more than 1,000 miles north of Jacksonville in Grand Rapids, Michigan, ArtPrize is thriving.

� e art festival, which has become the Midwest’s answer to South by Southwest, was conceived as a fi lm festival before becoming an art competition in Down-town Grand Rapids in 2009.

Similar to One Spark, ArtPrize start-ed out with one funder — in its case, Rick DeVos, a member of the family who founded Amway.

Recently, however, it has made major moves toward financial sustainabili-ty, signing multi-year corporate spon-sorships with companies such as Grand Rapids brewery Founders Brewing and regional supermarket chain Meijer’s.

“Over the course of eight years [includ-ing planning time], we transitioned from startup to long-term nonprofi t,” ArtPrize Director of Communications Todd Her-ring said. “� at transition can be tricky for people, and I suspect that’s probably what tripped up One Spark.”

Herring said ArtPrize focused on qual-ity over quantity when it came to spon-sors, which proved to be a good strategy.

“Reducing the number of sponsors that we have, but bringing in large spon-sors for multi-year commitments has been a success for us,” Herring said. “Not only does that give you a guarantee for subsequent years, but when other com-panies see that their peers and compet-itors are making multi-year commit-ments, they tend to follow suit.”

ArtPrize consults cities around the country who want to do their own ver-sions of the festival, but fi nd that they are not equipped to put on an event that requires so many resources. ArtPrize did, however, see potential in One Spark, and, after being approached by the Jackson-ville organizers, Herring traveled to the event in 2013.

“I thought it was a really fascinating concept. � e thing that was most exciting was that the city of Jacksonville seemed hungry for it. It was exciting to see people come out,” Herring said.

He said, despite the enthusiasm, it can still be hard to fi nd stability when it comes to funding.

“It’s diffi cult because people on staff will be working on sponsor activations as opposed to programming, but you have

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Creators and organizers — including Frederick Douglas and Lia Fuller, left; Michael Munz, right; and Wayne Wood, bottom — prepare for Spark Walk 2016.

COVER STORY