Something to consider...

[tommo]

The $20 day pass for Friday was intended to make it more affordable for new people to have a "taste" of SwanCon. However, it also meant that SwanCon might have lost some revenue from the non-first-timers that bought Friday day passes.

Perhaps a better option is to have day passes at their normal rates for all renewing attendees, but give first-timers a day where they can just attend for free? For a student/teenager, even $20 can be a fair bit of money, and if it's the difference between them attending a day for free or not attending at all, you're really not making any sort of a loss by letting them in. And if you make it free people will almost certainly be interested, and I think it'd result in a very impressive first-timer turnout. Keep in mind that you can get into Supanova for a day for about $20, so from the new attendee's perspective it's not like we're offering anything particularly out of the ordinary.

Hell, I'm starting to wonder if we should just let first-timers attend the whole damn con for free. I think, in the long term, it'd probably be a wise investment.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_fustian/]

2004's not breaking even wasn't a shame, considering how close to budget we were. (In fact, the main reason we made a loss at all was that A Certain Shop failed to give us the $900 or so they took on memberships.) Making a massive surplus, however...

[mynxii.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that it wasn't all that close to the budget - not including that Certain Shop? I'm happy to be wrong - my understanding that the 2 major factors were the cost of the hotel, and the effect of the new person memberships.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_fustian/]

While it's difficult to know exactly what led to the approx $1,500 deficit (ie. a bit under 4% of budget), the official reason was indeed put down to the cheap memberships experiment. (WASFF had "pre-authorised" up to a $1,500 deficit on the basis of the experiment, so on that basis we were very close to budget.)

[mynxii.livejournal.com]

Aaah cool - thanks for clarification :)

*hugs*