Quote:
Originally Posted by plnyyanks
- You need a venue
- You need a full crew of volunteers and to feed them for a weekend.
- You need an A/V setup
- All the media the goes along with an event (webcast, website, social accounts, etc.)
- Find money/sponsorship to pay for all of the above
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A few notes on this:
First, I'm not sure how other Districts run, but in Michigan most events are run out high schools and, as far as I am aware, have no "rental cost" to FiM or the event planing committee (maybe this was just our event, but I was pretty sure it had been a FiM prerequisite at one point). That cuts roughly $10k off the cost of each event right there. Obviously this requires enough High Schools with the necessary facilities and I'm not sure how MN compares to other states in this regard.
FiM largely solved the volunteer issue by requiring all teams to provide two volunteers for each event they participate in (though the volunteers do not necessarily have to go to the specific event the team does). Many key roles are still filled by a few "regulars" in the state who generally go to multiple events over the course of the competition season, but basically everything else is from the teams. It's certainly not perfect, and some events are sometimes a bit shorthanded, but all the events manage to get pulled off.
A simple solution to AV is to find a company that does AV productions for events and simply rent the expensive components of an AV system (projector, sound system, ect.) and supplement it with inexpensive video recording like the "GoPro on a Stick" method FiM has used for a number of years. When districts get more established it's possible to buy more of the expensive equipment to defray rental costs over the long term or to simply have a more elaborate AV presentation.
Media, while nice, and expected these days, is technically optional. There are still events that do not have live webcasts, an event website can consist of a well formatted google doc if done right (though it is a good idea to have event information on a website for the state organization), and social accounts are a nice feature to have but totally unnecessary in the grand scheme of things.
Finally, money is still, obviously the biggest hurdle, but as I mentioned above, if you're not paying venue costs, your event costs can drop to closer to $15k - $8k (and generally get cheaper over time). Bigger corporate sponsors are of course good places too look (we've actually found that some local companies that were not interested in sponsoring local teams, were interested in sponsoring an event), but there's also a lot that can be done in terms of in-kind donations from smaller local sponsors for events.
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