1,776 Drones Over the Badlands: Producing a Presidential Library’s Opening Weekend

The brief

Opening a $450 million institution is a communications problem. Opening one in Medora, North Dakota is a logistics problem wearing a communications problem’s clothes.

The town has a permanent population of about 130. There is no convention centre, no press filing room, no fleet of shuttles, and by opening week not a single available hotel room within thirty miles. Everything the weekend needed had to be built, borrowed or routed in — and it all had to work the first time, in front of a national press pool and a sitting President.

July 4 — the ceremony

The Grand Opening Ceremony began at 10:27 a.m. Mountain Time. Not 10:00, not 10:30. Roosevelt was born on 10/27/1858, and a start time is a free piece of interpretation if you are willing to make the run-of-show slightly harder to write.

The order of ceremony was built to say something before anyone spoke. It opened with a blessing of the land and the building by the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation — first, not as an acknowledgment slotted between welcome remarks. Rough Rider reenactors delivered the flags on horseback, raised during the anthem, performed by the Medora Musical cast. North Dakota’s Senate Majority Leader branded a piece of wood taken from a tree Roosevelt and his family planted at Sagamore Hill in 1895.

Then the speakers: board chair Hilary Hamm, Gov. Kelly Armstrong, Sens. John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, House Majority Leader Mike Lefor, CEO Ed O’Keefe, and Theodore Roosevelt V, whose line was the one the press took away:

Theodore Roosevelt’s life should not make us nostalgic for a more heroic past. It should make us more determined to build a worthy future.

Free tickets to the ceremony — all 3,500 of them — sold out, as did every museum admission for the day.

Eyes on the Stars — the drone show

Eyes on the Stars: Theodore Roosevelt and the American West was produced with Nova Sky Stories and flown with 1,776 drones. The number is the whole point — a show staged on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, counted in the year it was signed.

The production numbers are the interesting part. Per KFYR-TV: six to nine months of design, two pilots, every drone’s path individually tracked, and a show visible across a three-to-five-mile radius. Organizers described it as the largest in the Midwest to date. Roughly 6,000 people watched the July 4 show — a combination of Library guests and the Medora Musical audience next door, which is roughly forty-six times the town’s population.

It also solved a real problem. A museum closes at 6 p.m. A destination has an evening. Putting a free, ticketless spectacle in the sky after dark gave every visitor a reason to stay the night rather than drive back to Dickinson — which is worth more to the region than any advertising the Library could have bought.

July 2–3 — Campfire & Prairie Talks

Two days, twelve sessions, four themes: conservation and stewardship; leadership, policy and public service; well-being, purpose and the outdoors; culture, storytelling and legacy. All of it in the Library auditorium, all of it livestreamed and archived.

The booking is the story. In a town of 130 people, over 48 hours:

• Doris Kearns Goodwin on finding hope in history
• Amb. Rahm Emanuel on America and the world stage
• Arthur C. Brooks on the strenuous life and the search for happiness
• Harold Hamm and Johnny Morris in separate prairie-side chats
• Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Kevin Cramer — a Democrat and a Republican — on one stage on TR’s legacy in government
• Every living North Dakota governor: Armstrong, Burgum, Dalrymple, Schafer and Hoeven, together
• CEOs of Microsoft (vice chair), Bank of America and Chevron on the Square Deal at 250
• Three retired admirals on Roosevelt and naval leadership
• Craig Dykers of Snøhetta on the making of the building itself

Sessions of that quality do not survive a bad room. Producing them meant an auditorium that had never hosted anything, a livestream with no local broadcast partner, and a schedule tight enough that a single overrun would cascade into the evening programming.

All twelve sessions: Campfire & Prairie Talks playlist · the full program.

The logistics were the communications

The unglamorous half of this job is the half that determines whether anyone has a good time. For a town this size, the operational plan was the visitor experience:

• Free public shuttles running throughout Medora all weekend, because parking for tens of thousands does not exist.
• Chateau Road closed to private vehicles July 2–4, turning the approach into a controlled corridor.
• A four-day town-wide festival — free entry at Chimney Park, food trucks, a vendor fair, kids’ activities — so that people without a timed ticket still had a reason to come and a place to be.
• The Medora Musical nightly with a patriotic 250th finale, and the Pitchfork Steak Fondue at 5:30, both folded into the weekend rather than competing with it.
• Published overflow lodging guidance for five surrounding towns, from Belfield at fifteen minutes to Bismarck-Mandan at two hours, because telling people the truth about a sold-out town beats letting them discover it at 11 p.m.

That last one is the pattern worth naming. Every one of those decisions cost the Library something in the short term — admitting rooms were gone, admitting tickets were gone, sending visitors to other towns’ hotels and other operators’ restaurants. A weekend that strands ten thousand people is not a successful opening no matter how good the ceremony was.

Three audiences, one weekend

The thing that makes this harder than a single event is that four days had to serve three groups with incompatible needs, without any of them noticing the others were being served.

• Founding benefactors got July 2–3 — invitation-only preview access, dedications, and early time in the galleries before the public arrived. Donors who fund a $500 million campaign should see it first, and quietly.
• The national press got the presidential dedication on July 1 and an embargo window that had already been running for two weeks.
• The public got July 4 — a free ceremony, a sold-out building, a free festival, and a free drone show.

Run those on top of each other and each one degrades the others: press in the galleries during a donor preview, donors competing with 3,500 ticketholders for parking. Sequencing them across four days is what made all three work.

What I’d carry forward

• Put the meaning in the schedule. A 10:27 start time and 1,776 drones are free interpretation. They cost nothing and they are the details people repeat.
• Sequence audiences, don’t stack them. Benefactors, press and public each got their own day. Any two of them in the same room diminishes both.
• Livestream everything. Twelve sessions of that calibre in a town of 130 people would otherwise reach 3,500 — and then vanish. The archive is the asset.
• Give people an evening. The drone show converted a day trip into an overnight stay, which is the difference between a visit and a regional economy.
• Tell people the bad news early. Publishing “sold out” and “stay in Belfield” in advance costs conversions and buys goodwill you cannot otherwise purchase.

Why it mattered

A ribbon-cutting is an hour. An opening is a place deciding, in public, what kind of institution it intends to be.

The weekend set the terms: an institution that opens with an Indigenous blessing before it opens with a speech, that puts a bipartisan Senate pair and five governors on the same stage, that gives away its biggest spectacle for free, and that tells you honestly there is no room at the inn. The $98 million in earned media followed from having something genuinely worth covering.

Video: Grand Opening playlist · Campfire & Prairie Talks · the presidential visit. Attendance figures via KFYR-TV; drone-show production detail via KFYR-TV.