Yeah, no posts of note last week. I was feeling kind of down and much feel like posting.
So what did I do? Well, on Wednesday I struck out northwestwards to get some pictures for use by Midwest FurFest. This put me conveniently near the engravers who handle our staff badges every year, so I was able to stop by, chat a bit, and kick around ideas for this year’s designs. I’m pretty happy with what we decided on, and now all I have to do is e-mail him the template and the list of names and titles and we’ll be good to go (and this year I won’t forget the Guests of Honor like I did last year, with that lovely “Oh sh#t!” moment on Wednesday night). Afterwards, I drove down and picked up takaza after work. Last week was month-end for him, and between doing the work of multiple people and the stress of more and more tasks being piled on him, it was not a good week. I hope I was able to help a little bit, anyway.
On Thursday, after I took Dan in to work, I stopped by the MFF storage locker and picked up a few things, and dropped off a few things that had been sitting in linnaeus‘s garage since Anthrocon, as well. I stopped by a printer and got a quote for the attendee badges for this year – we’re going to a new, faster system, but wow, the price of badge blanks just got a lot more expensive! I need to call a couple more places for quotations and see if I can get the price down at all. That was also an especially tough day for Dan at work, so I drove back out and picked up dinner for him (and a tasty milkshake as a special treat), and after we ate I sat at the desk across from him and read the paper while he finished up; he finished up and we left $employer a little after 9 PM.
Dan got out of work surprisingly close to on time on Friday, and in much better spirits too. After I picked him up, we took back roads up to Antioch and had a lovely evening with roho, genet, and the visiting-from-Maryland ottr. We had a delightful evening filled with tasty burgers at Charcoal Grill, a hysterical shopping trip in the liquor department of Woodman’s, drunken Apples to Apples, and the alarmingly rapid consumption of a bottle of Pucker (“How does it taste?” “Blue.”). The next morning, following a typically delicious breakfast at Las Vegas Restaurant (mmm, chocolate chip pancakes…), we all went our separate ways.
The rest of the weekend was spent working on MFF-related stuff: preparing last-minute orders for promotional materials, Dan working on the con book, me helping Dan work on the con book, and other fun stuff. I’ve got a stack of confirmation postcards to go out (and I need to print more of them and buy more postage – great googly moogly, that’s a lot of registrations!) We also took some amusing pictures to accompany the Chairman’s Welcome (I’ll be keeping those for future blackmail material, Paul 😉 Dinner Sunday night was some tasty steaks, and catching up with “The Amazing Race.”
Lots to do this week – hopefully some good stuff going on tomorrow, but in the meantime there’s a ton of orders I need to place and phone calls I need to make. Never a dull moment…
You’re the second person to mention playing Apples to Apples this weekend… I’ll take that as a sign that we need to get more copies in at the store.
Glad you had what sounds like a good weekend, hopefully this weekend is better for ya!
Yaknow, I’m sure it’s nice to get that confirmation postcard in the mail, but it sounds like it’d be cheaper to just send out e-mails that say our payment/registration was received/confirmed.
I’m sure you guys (the convention) make plenty of money, but eh, I think people would understand ;).
Trust me, that’s been suggested many times over the last six years. The problem is that for postcards, there’s a failure rate (returned cards) of around 2%; for e-mails it’s more like 10%, due to mis-typed addresses, full mailboxes, and faulty mailservers. As for the cost of postage, that runs us around $400 total. Given that our annual revenue is around $70,000 (estimated for this year), we’ve decided that that is an acceptable cost to be sure that our members get the peace of mind know that their membership has been received and processed.
And yet every year there seems to be a crowd of people that gripe about things like lost registrations or upgrades XD. But Wow!?!, I guess I wouldn’t have expected revenue like that…I mean, it all get’s used up just about every year for renting the space and acquiring the block of hotels, right? What’s this all really for?
Actually, I can count the number of people who have griped to me about lost registrations and upgrades each year on one hand, and we work very hard to make sure we do right by them; it’s a point of honor for me, and part of what I think is our obligation as a part of our commitment to professionalism. If you know anyone who has had problems like this, I would urge you to send them my way and I would be very happy to investigate the problem for them.
As for where the money goes – as a non-profit corporation, we are limited in what we can do with the proceeds. A large chunk of that goes to the hotel to pay for catering, suites (such as Con Suite and rooms for Guests of Honor), and things like phone lines (we don’t actually pay for the function space – that we get in exchange for meeting our room block commitments). Another, bigger chunk goes to pay for all the goodies we give at Registration – the con books, the bags, the sponsor goodies. And every year we try to match contributions to our charity, as well. And of course there’s things like radio rental, storage space rental, and miscellaneous smaller expenditures. In the past, this has left us with a nest egg of between $7,000 – $15,000. This carries over to the next year and is invested back into the convention in the form of capital improvements (such a a new puppet stage for this year, and new laptops and printers for Registration).
The one thing does NOT happen, ever, is anyone associated with the convention getting a penny of any of those proceeds. We are solely volunteer-operated, and we work to make the convention happen for the challenge and for the fun of it.
Hopefully this makes things a bit clearer. I know conventions can sometimes seem like weird, monolithic entities, but really it’s just a bunch of people who decided to get together and say, “Let’s put on a show!”, writ large 🙂
Well I kinda knew that last part :P. Just don’t want you thinking I’m jumping ya or anything with these questions. I appreciate the time and answers though. I’m kinda just a lowly volunteer as is, usually don’t have the time or finances to provide more help. Who’s in charge of Goaphers this year, btw? I hadn’t heard back from anyone yet.
Hey, no problem. After I wrote that last bit it occurred to me that it sounded a bit defensive, which wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I’m of the opinion that openness and transparency is good, though, and that the more people who understand just how the sausage is made (so to speak) the better 🙂
Cutter McCoy is our Gopher Wrangler again this year; he has said in staff meetings that he wouldn’t be getting in touch with folks until about a week before the convention, so give him just a little longer.
See you in a few weeks! (Ack!)