On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Mike Hellweg wrote:
Do we have any convention guidelines (room nights, hotel space needed for vendor room, silent or regular auction, speaker rooms, etc.)?
We have lots of guidelines, which Scott lovingly collected into a document for the 2006 convention hosts. We have not updated the document since deciding to self-host any future conventions after 2006, but have write-ups that fill in some of the blanks.
I have enclosed my write-up notes from 2008 (which includes a good comparison table from all the conventions showing how many registrations and banquets we've had over the years).
I've also enclosed Scott's Treasurer's Report, which has every financial data point you'd ever want to read (and many you wouldn't). I think there might be room nights in there. I'm sure we could dig out those stats from the e-mail archives... looks like we had a 143-roomnight commitment in 2008.
The Vendor room, which you call out in particular, is very interesting. In 2006 we had a fairly small space (think 2/9 ballroom, aka small meeting room) and filled it up completely with vendors, registration and clubs. Convention-goers commented how nice it was. In 2008, we had an entire 1/3 ballroom, and it looked empty. Folks commented how empty and lame it was.
Speaker rooms are paid for. Only the "guest" speaker airline is paid for. I can't remember if we comp every speaker banquet (we probably do).
We've done live auctions at every AGA since 2003, and I think that is the way to continue. We did silent auctions as well in 2003, but it was fairly painful to run both, so we've just done live since then. The sheer number of items (650-700 lots) requires a live auction. The last two conventions have successfully used the GSAS Auction system I developed
described here: http://www.aquatic-gardeners.org/Auction/system.html but we're obviously not married to it.Just for everyone else's benefit on this list... Normally I would be a lot more skeptical and cynical and not be providing all this information so quickly, as we've had the mostly less-than-stellar experiences with local clubs sponsoring conventions, but MASI is a well-established organization that has hosted many national conventions. Mike may not say a lot on this list, but he's very active with the ALA, for instance.
- Erik -- Erik Olson Sent from my crusty old Linux box erik at thekrib dot com
Attachment:
post2008.docx
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AGA2K8 Treasurer's Report-ver3c.doc
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