Evaluating Your Alberta Approved Farmers' Market

Evaluating Your Alberta Approved Farmers’ Market

Once your Alberta approved farmers’ market is open, it is important to evaluate all aspects of the market each season. Look at the market operations from all sides – market operations, vendors, management, board of directors or advisory committee, the sponsor and consumers. This will help to identify areas that need improvement and will enable you to plan for market growth.

The information contained in this document is meant to help you get started in your evaluation efforts. There may be other aspects to your farmers’ market that should also be evaluated.

Market Operations

The following sections deal with evaluating the day-to-day operations of your farmers’ market.

Market Logistics
During the planning phase, the market organizers think very carefully about the most suitable time of day, day of the week, and length of the market day and season. They usually consider what is the most convenient for prospective vendors and customers. It is important to evaluate these things once the market is operational to ensure this holds true.

Evaluate the market logistics with respect to your vendors. Vendors may change their operations making it difficult for them to commit to certain days of the week. Seasonal vendors may not have product at certain times of the year making your vendor pool quite small in the shoulder seasons. A good vendor mix throughout the season is critical for success as your goal is to keep your customers engaged for the full season. Customers who come early or late in the season to find nothing but home-based businesses may not come back. Once a full season has occurred, you can look at how many vendors you had each week, what categories they fell into (food, agricultural, crafts or other) and whether you had gaps at certain times of the year. Also keep in mind the guideline requirements to have an average of at least ten vendors per market with an average of 80 per cent of the vendors being Albertans making, baking or growing the products they are selling.

Sometimes what customers say they will do and how they actually behave once the market is open may be entirely different. While a market operating from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm may have appealed to customers during the planning phase, you may find that no one comes after 6:00 pm. Customer counts can be invaluable in helping you determine how busy your market is overall as well as at what times during the market. This can be done several ways: one would be to simply count the number of paying customers (although influential, children are typically not the ones making purchases and so shouldn’t be included in your customer counts) several times throughout the market day to gauge when it is busiest; another way would be to count all the customers throughout the day, keeping track every half hour or hour so you know when it was busiest. Repeat this exercise several times throughout the season. Also, have a look to see how long they are staying and whether they are shopping or visiting at the coffee table. You may have to think about the customers you are attracting versus the customers you would like to attract in relation to your market hours and day of the week.

Market Location
There are several factors that need to be looked at when evaluating the location of the market:

• Does it meet your needs with the current number of vendors and vendor tables or stalls?
• Is there an ability to expand the number of vendors or vendor tables in this location? Keep in mind your vision for the size of the market.
• Is the current location missing any amenities for customers and/or vendors?
• Do you have an ATM machine? If you do, track how many transactions per week went through the machine as well as the average amount of money dispensed per transaction.
• Is the current location accessible for customers by foot, car and/or public transit? If you are lacking in any of these areas, what might you do to help your customers get to the market?
• Is parking acceptable? Is there a parking lot or do customers park on the street? Are there an adequate number of stalls? The rule of thumb is 2 – 3 stalls per vendor. Is the parking lot dirt, gravel or paved? How far do customers have to walk from the parking lot to the market itself? If customers have to walk a considerable distance, do the vendors offer a carry-out service or is this something the market can implement?

• What is missing? Did situations arise during the year that could have been handled better if a rule had been in place?
• What rules might be unnecessary? For example, maybe you planned to allow vendors to park behind their outdoor stalls but the town you are in no longer allows that. If the rule simply doesn’t apply, it should be removed.
• Are all rules enforced consistently? Are some rules simply not enforceable and therefore redundant? Consistency is key when enforcing market rules. Vendors can live with strict rules as long as all vendors have to abide by the same rules. Sometimes rules simply aren’t enforceable and should be removed or changed. At other times, however, lack of rule enforcement may be a performance issue with the manager which needs to be dealt with during the manager’s performance evaluation.
• Do you have an appeals process in place and are vendors aware of it? Sometimes rules that make sense on paper really don’t work too well in practice. If you have specific rules that are being appealed over and over again, revisit the rule to see if it needs revising.

• During the planning stages, you should have identified your target audience and how to reach them. Were your advertising and promotional efforts successful at enticing your target audience to shop at the market?
• Some markets very effectively use free publicity to spread the word about the market. What is available in your community and are you tapping into it?
• What was your advertising budget versus actual expenditures? Some markets don’t have a marketing budget, relying solely on word of mouth advertising. While this can be effective, was it effective at attracting the target audience you want at the market?
• When you consider word of mouth advertising, can you gauge the “buzz” about the market in your community? Are people talking about the market and what are they saying? If there is positive talk, how can you build on that? If there is negative talk, how can you rectify that?
• What formal methods did you use in the past year to promote the market? Do you have a website, a Facebook or Twitter account and how often do you update or make posts? Do you use radio, television or print ads, flyers, posters, signs, etc.? Do you have a customer newsletter? How many customers receive it?
• If you use social media such as Facebook and Twitter, track your number of “likes” on Facebook and your number of “followers” on Twitter. If you received any negative posts on your Facebook page or negative tweets, how did you handle them?
• Ask your customers how they found out about you and if any type of advertising or promotions in particular caught their eye.
• Did customer traffic seem steady throughout the year? When were there gaps? Could this have been changed with increased advertising and promotions?
• Consider advertising and promotional efforts done by other farmers’ markets and other businesses. What caught your attention and is this something that could be adapted and implemented for your farmers’ market?

• How many additional customers did the event attract?
• Did the customers come to shop or simply take part in the celebrations?
• Did you receive any feedback from customers? If you didn’t get any feedback during or immediately following the event, how can you seek out feedback now? If you did receive feedback, was it positive or negative? Positive feedback, i.e. testimonials, can be used in your promotional materials for future events. Negative feedback can be used to help make improvements to future events.
• Did you continue to see an increase in customer volumes in the weeks following the event?

• How many additional vendors did the event attract?
• Did the vendors sell the same, more or less product during the event? This is important because some vendors find special events are not as successful as regular markets simply because the customers are there to enjoy the celebration and don’t come to shop. This can be true of events held in conjunction with other events such as fairs when the customers plan to spend a long period of time at the fair and can’t readily purchase perishable products. However, craft vendors may do particularly well because the clientele is different from a regular market.
• Given the above, did you have the right vendor mix for the customers that attended? If not, what can you do to make improvements for future events?

• How many additional hours were required to put on the event? Was the market manager solely responsible for planning, organizing and executing the event or were there additional volunteers?
• Was there additional budget required to host the event? Was it sufficient to properly host and promote the event and attract the expected crowds?
• If the special market was held in a different location, what were the challenges with that location? Were you able to have the same, more or fewer vendors?
• If you were able to have more vendors, how difficult was it to fill the vendor stalls with appropriate vendors? Vendor information from the special events is included in the annual 80/20 calculation for the market so it is important to consider what types of products the additional vendors brought and how that will impact your annual 80/20 split.
• If you partnered with another group, what were the challenges of working with the partner? Would you consider working with that partner again? Or what would have to be done differently in order to work with that partner again? It is a good idea to have an event debrief with partners to talk openly about what did and didn’t go well and how improvements can be made for future events you work together on.
• Did you receive any local press as a result of the event, i.e. did the local newspaper write a story about it? If yes, did this have any impact on customer attendance at future regular markets?

• Do you do an annual budget? All Alberta approved farmers’ markets operate as non-profits so you want to create a budget that shows enough revenue to cover expenses.
  Some revenue categories to consider are:
  • Table fees/stall rent
  • Donations
  • Fundraising
  • Sponsorships
  • ATM revenues if machine is owned
  Some expense categories to consider are:
  • Accounting fees
  • Advertising/promotion
  • AFMA membership fee
  • ATM fees if machine is rented
  • Bank charges
  • Business license
  • Insurance
  • Manager’s professional development
  • Manager’s salary/honorarium
  • Signage rental or purchase
  • Table rental or purchase
  • Venue rent
• Did you bring in enough revenue to cover all your expenses?
  • If a sponsored market, any budget surplus is often used to help offset the costs of other operations or events put on by the sponsor; any budget deficit is typically covered by the sponsor’s other operations.
  • If your market is a non-profit society, you need to be careful how much money is accumulated by the market. It can impact your non-profit status. Some markets give excess funds to charity or set up a scholarship fund for any surplus funds. If you had a deficit, how do you plan to cover the deficit?
• If you experienced a deficit, is it possible to raise table rents, attract more vendors, receive sponsorship money, etc.?
• Were there any expense categories that were particularly high? Are there other options available to you so you don’t have that high expense in future?

• The number of vendors in your market each week; and
• What categories those vendors fall into - agricultural products, food products, craft products, other/resell products.
  • Smaller markets are often challenged with maintaining an average of 10 vendors each week as required under the Alberta Approved Farmers’ Market Guidelines. It is important to maintain a critical mass of vendors so that customers feel there is a reason to shop at the market. At the end of the year, look back at the number of vendors who came each week. If there were weeks where you fell short, were there valid reasons, i.e. snowstorm, funeral, etc.? Or were those weeks early or late in the season when seasonal vendors didn’t have sufficient product to attend the market? This goes back to the points made above when considering the length of your season.
  • Consumer surveys indicate that agricultural and food products are the primary products customers buy at farmers’ markets with over 80 per cent of farmers’ market expenditures made on food grown or made in Alberta. With that in mind, determine your category breakdowns. What percentage of your vendors are selling food that is grown or made in Alberta? What percentage of your vendors are selling crafts or other/resale items? If challenged with getting sufficient vendors in the appropriate categories, what needs to change in order to reach your vision for the market?
• Once you have considered your numbers, evaluate how you are recruiting vendors. Do you specifically seek out certain types of vendors? Or do you wait until potential vendors approach you? Do you advertise for vendors? If yes, where and how successful has that been? Some markets recruit new vendors by using print advertising in local papers, ads on online classified sites such as Kijiji or Craigslist, Facebook posts, flyers on vacant tables at the market, by attending other markets in the area operating on a different day of the week or time of day, etc.
• Are you able to get vendors to commit to a full season? Vendors will act very strategically and choose markets where their products sell the best. This can result in them trying out markets and not necessarily committing until they have a good sense of profitability at that market. There are some tactics that other markets use to get vendors to commit to a full season: discounts are offered for full-season commitment; voting privileges are granted at vendor meetings if the vendor has attended a certain number of markets per season, etc.
• Evaluate how many vendors you have in each micro-category, i.e. how have you determined how many bakers or produce vendors to have? How have you determined what the “demand” is for certain products in your marketplace so that you can adjust your vendor mix accordingly? Competition and choice for customers is good but there needs to be thoughtful decision-making between having choices and ensuring your market is not saturated with certain products. You want your vendors to make money in your market and saturating the market could potentially drive vendors away. However, some vendors push for exclusivity which also doesn’t result in a healthy marketplace.
• Evaluate your market flow. Can customers enter and leave only in one place or can they come into the market multiple ways? How does this impact how they move through the market? Is how customers walk through the market logical? Which vendors are at the front door and which are at the back of the building? Which vendors are a “draw” for customers and where are they placed in your market? Appropriately placing vendors in a market can be really challenging. Vendors all want the “best” spot but the manager needs to balance that with ensuring that customers are drawn through the market, giving each vendor equal opportunity to be seen and to sell.

• Customize this to meet the needs of your market.
• Evaluate the market manager on each duty or responsibility within that job description. To get the discussion started, have the manager complete his/her own appraisal. This way, examples can be included. You will often find that individuals are harder on themselves than others observing them.
• Did the manager complete the required training? Has the manager participated in or asked to participate in any additional training throughout the year? Is the market able to fully or partially finance this training?
• Managing conflict can be a big part of the market manager’s job that can’t be accounted for in a job description. Most people don’t like dealing with conflict but some people are much better at handling issues than others. Be sure to include discussions about conflict situations – what went well, what didn’t go so well, how the process can be improved in the future, etc.

• What involvement does the sponsor have with the farmers’ market?
• Is there a liaison from the sponsor who attends market meetings and sits on the market advisory committee or does someone from the advisory committee attend the sponsor’s meetings? This is important so that communication is open; either way is acceptable.
• Is the sponsor supportive of the day-to-day operations or how could the sponsor have been more supportive?
• Has the sponsor been supportive in times of conflict or how could the sponsor have been more supportive?

• Has the customer base been sufficient on a weekly basis to make the market viable for vendors? If not, are the market times, day of the week or season length convenient for them? Are your promotional efforts reaching your target audience?
• What are customers asking for? Complaining about? How have issues been resolved with customers?
• Is there a good relationship between customers and the manager? Do customers approach the manager if they have concerns about vendors or the market in general?
• How do you elicit input/feedback from customers? What other methods could you use? How often do you ask for input/feedback from your customers during the year?

• You could hire a consultant to help you evaluate aspects of your market. This option should be considered carefully because of the potential costs to use a consultant.
• Rapid Market Assessment: This tool was developed by Larry Lev, Linda Brewer and Garry Stephenson of Oregon State University. It includes information on conducting attendance counts, using dot surveys where you ask a series of pointed questions that the respondents answer by putting colored sticky dots on a flipchart and, constructive comments and observations. The data collection and assessment is done by market management and market volunteers. It doesn’t require a large budget but does require commitment from the volunteers. You can access information about how to conduct your own rapid market assessment by going here.
• There are a number of resources available for conducting evaluations of your farmers’ market. These can be found online by typing evaluating your farmers’ market into your internet search engine.
• There are several online survey tools that can be used to conduct and compile survey results. Some of these tools are free while others require you to purchase the software and sign a licensing agreement. Consider how often you will use the tool and how user friendly it is prior to making your final decision. If your needs are simple, questions on a flipchart may suffice.

• Consider changes that need to be made for safety reasons first. Vendor, customer and staff safety is paramount.
• Look at improvements that would be considered “low hanging fruit” – things you can do fairly easily with minimal costs and which will have a fairly significant impact on your market.
• Some improvements will take longer periods of time to accomplish and can be tackled at the same time as other, simpler changes.
• Always consider budget and human resource requirements. You don’t want to spend beyond your means and you don’t want to overtax your manager or volunteers.