June's Windscape Kite Festival and Long Day's Night Music Festival provided quite the boost to Swift Current's economy according to an economic impact study by Tourism Saskatchewan.

$2.78 million of gross output and nearly $1.5 million of GDP came from pair of events as over 11,000 people attended. Half the attendees came from out of town.

Bonnie Baird of Tourism Saskatchewan said that having a high percentage of festival goers come from out of town is what really helps bring in dollars.

"Fifty percent non-resident at any kind of festival or event is very high," she said. "Most festivals and events see between 10 and 25 of their participation from outside."

Windscape Organizer Shann Gowan said the dollar figures the study yielded were higher than she expected.

"I knew that they were fairly high," she said. "We had always quoted about a million, and that was strictly based on how many people from out of town there were. So I was pleasantly surprised."

Gowan said they hope to have more locals attend next year, though Baird said having around a third of the City's populous out for the event was very impressive.

Going into next year, Baird said they identified a group of people they could target to try to bring into town for the festival.

Working with Environics Research Group, Baird said they identified affluent families primarily from Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, and Edmonton as a group they could target more for the kite festival,

"They're a very interesting group," Baird said. "They're very strong travellers. They are people who will do everything from go to New York City for an urban experience to the most-remote location for an outdoor experience. As long as they have something they can learn, or experience. The kite festival is kind of set up ideally for that kind of market who just wants to go away with knowing that they learned something and experienced the community."

Gowan said they've been doing studies of their own for years, but this was the first time looking externally.

"We had done a little bit of an in-house and came up with numbers that I didn't want to say out loud in case they didn't believe me. So having somebody else do it for us to make it official just helps."

Over two days, there were 5,000 in-person surveys on site. There were 220 volunteers for the event.

"Our goal is to increase our numbers every year, and to make this wider spread and more people know about it," said Gowan. "So we're hoping that some of the data that we can get from Sask Tourism will help us plan it better and reach more people and make it bigger. I'm looking for a little bit more support from the community since we were able to turn it around and make it into something even bigger."

Next year's kite festival is slated to run June 23-24. Tourism Saskatchewan won't be doing another economic-impact study for at least a few more years, as the 2018 results would likely be similar.