What a sponsor’s dollar actually buys

So where does that multiplier come from?

The festival’s cash budget is small. Its production is not. The difference is made up by director-level work that is almost entirely donated, roughly a thousand hours of volunteer labour, and entertainment that partners provide at cost or for nothing.

Try buying this festival at full commercial price. A professional skydiving finale. BMX stunt performers. A trackless train. A tethered hot-air balloon. Musicians. Dancers. A robotics team. Equipment. Marketing. Event production. Setup. Teardown. And roughly a thousand hours of volunteer work.

We do not buy all of that. We build a community that brings it. 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 $7,500 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.

Your sponsorship helps put a child on a bike

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 $1,600 to make. Across the festival’s 8 years we have raised $50,000+ for them, and 42 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.

That is the part of this festival we are proudest of. A sponsorship helps create an enormous free celebration for Davis, and then helps give a child something that lasts long after Halloween is over: the ability to ride. To ride down the street. To ride with friends. To ride beside brothers and sisters. To do something most children simply get to do.

The zombies disappear November 1. The trikes do not.

Meet the children and the people who build the trikes.

What a gift like this buys

• $150 Helps a community group take part in the festival.
• $500 Powers one entertainment station for the whole day.
• $1,000 Covers most of a tryke for one child.
• $1,600 Buys a complete tryke, built and fitted to one child.
• $3,000 and up Several trykes, and helps us add a major attraction.

These are illustrations of what things cost, not a promise that a particular gift is spent on a particular item. NorCal Trykers decide how funds are used.

Eight years of raising the dead

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.

Yes, we did the math

The sponsor count above is read from our own records as this page loads, so it is current rather than something typed in and forgotten. The ranges are modelled, and how they are modelled is set out below.

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.

Ready to join the horde?

Help us build a bigger Halloween for Davis, and put more kids on bikes.