When the Sarasota Chalk Festival ran into funding problems and almost had to cancel last November’s festival, social media came to the rescue. Denise Kowal, the festival’s founder, sent a message to a Facebook group of all the participating artists, asking them to write letters to the city commission; the artists spread the word to their fans, and soon the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau and Sarasota Opera were also involved. Through Facebook, word-of-mouth and a “Chalk of the Town” QR tagging campaign downtown, the Chalk Festival gained support and raised enough money for the November event. Every part of the project pointed to the main website, and it paid off; by 8 a.m. on Friday the week of the event, the website had received 11,000 hits.

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