mchambers
Former CCA member
I guess. Weekends in March tend to coincide with school spring breaks, and also with an industry conference in California or Arizona that I usually attend, so for me it's probably a 50/50 shot at best.
If it takes begging, we're doing something wrong.
At the risk of sounding critical, I think you are. You're being too ambitious. The original goal for AM1 was to have a convention that was trimmed down from things like ACA, specifically so you didn't burn out volunteers. I think you partially succeeded. I was only able to attend for a few hours, but what I saw floored me, and all the comments I've heard indicated that everyone thought it was awesome. You should be proud of what you accomplished, it was a fantastic convention. By if your volunteers were overworked such that they are having reservations about doing this again, then you didn't quite achieve your goal of a simpler convention.
I'm the president of my amateur astronomy club, the Howard Astronomical League. We have about 150 members, meet monthly, and do a lot of public outreach. In my experience, I can count on 5 to 10 of our members to volunteer to help the club. And like CCA, they are the same 5 to 10 people. So the proportions (about 5 to 8%) are about the same as CCA. From what I've heard and seen from other hobbyist clubs, that's pretty typical. If you get 10%, you're doing great. So I wouldn't expect too many more people to volunteer.
So might I make a suggestion? Scope the convention to match your known labor force, rather than trying to get volunteers to staff the convention. You know from plenty of experience (AM1, ACA, Catfish Convention, etc.) how much work each of the convention components will be. Then do the project management math, and cut out any convention components you can't easily staff. For example, I think a convention with just great speakers, a marketplace, vendors, and a hospitality suite would still be an awesome convention. Could you arrange that without burning out 10 people? I bet you could.
I hope this didn't sound too critical; I love your passion and enthusiasm and I hope I'm not diminishing it. But I think the leadership of any all volunteer hobbyist club needs to be realistic and not over reach or people will burn out.
Oh, and assuming I'm available, I would certainly attend, and I would be willing to help with the website again. I didn't actually vote, though, because I'm using the Monster app, which doesn't show the polls.
Sent from my iPad using MonsterAquariaNetwork app
I have the app so can't vote but I'd go and help out
Sent from my iPhone using MonsterAquariaNetwork app
Just out of curiosity, what are you looking for in order to decide? I would imagine there's a haircut to the poll numbers because not everyone who said they would help will really be free that weekend... it seems like there is a danger of this landing on a relatively small number of shoulders. On the other hand, it seems like there is a strong preference to hold the event rather than not. I don't envy the leadership what seems to me like a tough call.Other than the couple dozen (out of ~200 members), anyone else feel strongly for (or against) holding AquaMania 2014?
I'll take non-response as, "Meh, knock yourself out if you'd like, but I really don't care one way or the other whether we have AquaMania or a regular meeting in March 2014..."
Matt
Just out of curiosity, what are you looking for in order to decide? I would imagine there's a haircut to the poll numbers because not everyone who said they would help will really be free that weekend... it seems like there is a danger of this landing on a relatively small number of shoulders. On the other hand, it seems like there is a strong preference to hold the event rather than not. I don't envy the leadership what seems to me like a tough call.
To make sure I'm clear, I'm certainly not saying profitability is everything. I do think not losing money is important, and that's why I asked the question -- it was not transparent to me personally how this impacted the club's bottom line, because it WAS an incredible value... and I do care about that to the extent it impacts other tradeoffs that can be made. I appreciate Jon putting my mind at ease on that count.
The slam dunk aspect is more what I'm worried about. I commend you guys for trying to gage interest and make sure it is there before the club collectively bites off more than it can chew and imposes that on too few people. It just worries me, like I am sure it worries you, to see 21 people throw out the "yes and yes" vote, knowing probably some of them won't make it due to the realities of scheduling. Maybe back to Chris's very good points... what CAN we do with that number of people (haircut for schedules)?