12 Months to Fair Voting – Electoral Reform Conference May 10/11 at UVic
VENUE: Piper Gordon has booked us the Elliott 167 (seats 148) for our plenary meetings and two other rooms for workshops (rooms 160 and 162 which seat 59 and 54 people, possibly respectively). The lobby has also been booked for our breaks and so as to adhere with fire regulations. These bookings are from 8:30 to 6:00 on the 10th and from 9 to 1 on the 11th.
These rooms are booked under the UVic's Fair Vote Club name as they are the sponsor and the rest of us have simply been "invited" to participate. As such, the room bookings have not cost us anything BUT the catering will make up for that (on the other hand, with a club account number apparently we aren't charged GST). It is important in all advertising etc. that we highlight the Fair Vote Club (which I didn't do in my newsletter! Aargh!)
Adam: would you look into how much it would cost us to rent the LCD projectors in all three rooms?
CATERING: see below.
ACCOMODATION: There should be some accommodation available on campus and I found something out about this at http://iess.uvic.ca/exchangestouvic/accommodation.html. I haven't had the time to put together any words about this or see if a group booking at the UVic residences would make sense. We should also include information about other possible accommodation - is anyone willing to put this package of information together?
ADVERTISING: I have sent out a first notice about the conference in the March newsletter and I may be willing to put some notices in the Lower Island News, Monday Mag, the community papers and the Times-Colonist (assuming that I actually have figured out how to do all of that successfully!). We should also be able to send a notice out to the FVC Victoria Chapter's list. But I can not do more than that. We should put a notice up on the facebook site. Who will take this on? or is what I've planned enough? And what should be in the content of our advertising - does the notice that Bruce has already drafted up with his draft agenda do the trick? (I modified that text slightly for the newsletter).
WEBSITE: We also need to put notices up on our web site. The Fair Voting BC site still has a notice about our fall conference as if it is upcoming. We need to change that (on both sites).
AGENDA: I am certainly out of my depth with the agenda. Bruce has built a draft agenda that I have been working with in terms of room bookings and catering. But more work needs to be done. For instance, I have no idea who we should ask to lead the various workshops etc. We have some speakers arranged (e.g. Dennis Pilon has agreed to talk) but there is still a lot of detail about the conference proceedings we need to develop.
I also wonder if we will have a lower attendance because of the two-day nature of the conference. It might help if we could help people find billets, but that is way beyond my ability to organize. I also wonder if we need two days? But then, this is dependent upon the agenda and what we hope to accomplish.
Will we really be able to get area and riding organizers to attend? as well as other interested organizers? Beyond notices in the FVBC newsletter this is NOT something I can work on. I've already got one e-mail from someone up-island who I thought would want to attend the conference but who appears to just be interested in dinner and listening to Andrew Coyne!
WEBSITE REGISTRATION: We are behind in setting up the web registration page at eventbrite.ca (NOT eventbrite.com!). This time around they will take 2.5% of the registration fees. I don't know how this will work for those willing to pay offline (via mail or at the front door). Further, paypal will take another 3 to 5% of the fees we get from eventbrite. This adds certain overhead which we have to build into our prices.
DINNER: Dinner at the Village Green (with Andrew Coyne as our guest speaker) will require a minimum of 50 attendees. If we want bar services then they must sell $350 or we make up the difference. Dinner won't be all that cheap. While we seem to have a number of options, including a BBQ, the minimum cost to us is $27.95 per person. This includes the room rental. We could increase the cost if we chose some hors d'oeuvres or went for a fancier meal.
This basic meal is a buffet with roast beef and just one choice of a second entree (e.g. instead of a second entree of Dijon Chicken we'd probably go with something vegetarian, such as Vegetarian lasagne, wild mushroom cannelloni or vegetarian wellington). We also only have one choice of starch (e.g. potatoes, rice, etc.) and one choice of dessert. The meal includes coffee and various teas. The UVic dinner buffet gives us quite a bit more choice but is $37.95 each. She talked about doing a BBQ also, given how nice the weather might be. I don't know what this would do to the cost.
So, if we go with the more basic buffet we could charge $40 per person? But if we want something more then we should charge $50 a person? What do you think?
If we don't think that we'll get 50 people we could reconsider the faculty club. I should also find out when we must cancel the Village Green by if we aren't using it - we currently have it booked and we're the only ones who'll be in the restaurant.
REGISTRATION: As before, I am willing to collect the registrants' names and keep track of fees paid, as well as register people at the conference. This kept me quite busy before, both before and at the conference. So I would prefer to be free of most other duties as we get closer to the conference (I'll also be going to the Citizens' Assembly conference in Vancouver on May 1 & 2).
REGISTRATION PACKAGE: While we need a package I don't have any plans to work on this. We need someone to take this on.
CATERING: I received a 29 page menu from catering and haven't really had a chance to look closely at it. Because this is happening on the weekend there is an additional $32 charge each time someone comes out to deliver food whether it be coffee or lunch. If you'd like a copy of the long menu let me know and I can e-mail it to you.
I am assuming three breaks: 2 on Saturday and one on Sunday with just one lunch: on Saturday.
Breaks: coffee/tea is $1.00 or $1.50 depending upon whether we want "executive service" which seems to include tablecloths + ? I have more questions to ask! Cookies, fresh fruit, bagels etc. seem to range from $0.85 to $2.25 per person. If we assume $3 per person @ 80 people we are looking at $240 per break x 3 breaks = $720.
The traditional lunch buffet is $12.95 a person while the gourmet sandwich service is $14.95 a person for either $1036 or $1196.
The additional charge of $32 per delivery is 4 x 32 = $128 for totals of $1164 or $1324.
Thus, each person's food costs are about $23.55 or $25.55. So, this is doable with the registration fee schedule that we had last time around: $60 early bird, $80 regular and $40 for students. We will have other expenses (e.g. the registration package, projector rentals, workshop materials, and registration website costs ~$275), but we could either "enrich" the food or reduce the fees.
Our catering order must be in by April 28 (with some changes possible by May 6 at the latest).