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!)

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.

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 🙂

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?

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.