It’s good to see that MIF has time to contact individual Manchester bloggers with updates. They sent me details about last year’s inaugural festival so here, for your perusal, are some of the good things that MIF 2007 achieved:

• •Created 25 world premieres, against a target of 10, with a total of 105 different activities in 25 venues
• •Attracted an audience of more than 200,000 people against a first year target of 160,000
• •Secured the greatest amount of sponsorship ever raised by a UK arts festival and broke even on a £9 million turnover
• •Collaborated with 80+ Manchester and Salford arts and community organisations
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• Generated an economic impact to the value of £28.8 million, against a target of £19.1m
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• Attracted audiences not generally well represented amongst conventional arts attendees in Manchester, and encouraged people to take risks with their choices
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• Recruited a task force of almost 300 volunteers who between them donated more than £200,000 worth of work hours to the Festival
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• Produced three events with international co-commissioning partners and five events with local and national co-commissioning partners

These facts and figures come from an independent report produced by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre and Arts About Manchester, by the way.

They’ve also set the dates for next year’s festival – 2-19 July 2009 – and want to remind us that the deadline for Manchester Open, their call for submissions by local artists, is fast approaching. I’m sure we’d all love a share of the £300,000 available…