What a sponsor’s dollar actually buys

Where that multiple comes from

The festival’s cash budget is small. Its production is not. The difference is made up by donated director-level work, roughly a thousand hours of volunteer labour, and entertainment that partners provide at cost or for nothing: a skydiving finale, a BMX stunt show, a tethered hot-air balloon, a trackless train, professional performers, robotics and dance teams.

Priced at what a commercial producer would pay for the same event, one year of the festival looks like this.

A $1,000 sponsorship does not buy $1,000 of festival.
It buys roughly $6,000 of it.

What Halloween Saturday moves in Davis

Around three thousand people spend a Saturday in Davis instead of somewhere else: at Community Park in the morning, and on the downtown Trick-or-Treat Trail in the afternoon, where the foot traffic lands directly on Davis storefronts.

Standard practice discounts spending by local residents as money that would have circulated in Davis anyway, so the conservative figure counts only visitors from outside town: Sacramento, Woodland, Winters, Vacaville.

These are modelled estimates, not survey results. An attendee survey is planned so that next year’s version of this page can replace them with measured figures.

Every net dollar becomes a bicycle for a child who could not ride one

Net proceeds go to NorCal Trykers, who build custom adaptive tricycles for children with disabilities. Each trike is built to one child’s body and costs about $1,600 to make. Across the festival’s 8 years we have raised $50,000+ for them, and more than 40 children have a trike because of it.

This is unusually legible giving. There is no overhead story and no abstraction in the outcome: a sponsorship becomes a named local child riding down their own street alongside their brothers and sisters, on equipment they will use for years.

Meet the children and the people who build the trikes.

An eight-year-old tradition with a permanent home

The festival is produced by Davis Odd Fellows Lodge #169, the oldest organisation in Davis, working with The Bike Campaign and the Davis Bike Club. That matters to a sponsor in a practical way: this is not a pop-up event depending on one grant cycle. It has a producer with a permanent home on Second Street and eight years of doing this behind it.

Where the money is this year

Sponsorship for 2026 stands at $19,400 of a $35,000 target, across 181 sponsors and partners. These figures come straight from our own records and change as pledges land, so this page is never out of date.

Method and sources

1. Director-level hours valued at prevailing rates for event direction, fundraising and marketing in the Sacramento region.
2. Volunteer hours valued using the Independent Sector national estimate for the value of volunteer time. Independent Sector
3. Entertainment and production priced as commercial line items: skydiving display, BMX stunt show, tethered balloon, trackless train, performers, canopies and equipment.
4. Non-local attendance estimated at 15 to 25% of attendees, at $40 to $67 per person in day-trip spending, with a regional multiplier of about 1.6. The per-person benchmark and the convention of excluding resident spending follow IMPLAN’s analysis of community event impact.
5. Media value as advertising-equivalent cost of earned coverage in the Sacramento market.
6. Attendance, donation totals and trike counts are the festival’s own records.

Figures are modelled estimates prepared in August 2026 and presented as ranges. Live sponsorship totals are read from our own records at the moment you load this page.