No matter how much fun you intend to have during the conference, the bottom line is that this is a business, and it can bring in (or lose) tens of thousands of dollars depending on how the business is run.
Here are some words of advice from our own experience and learning from talking to other con heads: Do not expect much early monetary support for your convention when your bid is first approved. You’ll get a few early registrants who want to get the best rates, but most of your seed money will come from memberships from your committee and any fundraising efforts you make.
In order, your expenses will be: Flyers to promote your bid, then your actual convention (once it’s approved), the postage for mailing them to other cons, then your Future Fashion Folio (promotion, publication and postage), followed by a deposit on your hotel meeting space somewhere along the line. After that, you’ll need to think about publications like your Program Book, pocket program, and other items you’ll distribute to your members. Selling ads can help defray costs, but if your ads are all in-kind trades, you’ll have to take the actual cost to print into consideration (using the money you saved in advertising elsewhere).
When CC16 took place, there had only been one other Midwest Costume-Con before (and that had been 6 years prior). We anticipated a larger than normal number of first-time attendees who may not have been aware of the larger costuming community, the ICG, and the resources that are at one’s disposal with a Whole Costumer’s Catalog (WCC) [no longer published, the WCC was an essential resource in the days prior to the Internet]. The first time we received one, at CC10, we thought that it was worth its weight in gold. Also, the Editor, Karen Schnaubelt, was very willing to cut a very good deal. We felt it was important to get this publication into the hands of as many new, current or would-be costumers as possible. It might inspire them to pursue the hobby with more interest. As it happened, a fully-revised issue was scheduled to come out in 1998, making this a more desirable edition, rather than a partially updated one. We ordered an initial 250 copies, with a later shipment of 50 closer to the con. We only had a few left over, and most of those have been sold at the time of this writing.
—Bruce Mai, CC16
Approach all the expenses based on a “worst case scenario”, and an optimistic scenario. Then you can begin to draw up a very general budget based on the least and most number of memberships you may think you’ll sell. Remember that after your initial sale of memberships to Staff, they will trickle in over the three years before your event, punctuated with a few more at each deadline before you raise the price (which stimulates much needed revenue).
We operated on the worst case scenario (300 total memberships), which proved to be pretty accurate, and we did pretty well, financially. If you intend to offer some sort of complimentary memberships to certain special guests (or tech people), use them sparingly and make sure only the Con Chair(s) have final approval to make those offers. Then, be sure to factor those into your budget.
Don’t forget to take into account expenses for tech equipment. You won’t get an accurate cost estimate until you’re maybe 9 months from your convention date. In the meantime, you can at least get some idea by adding 4% to a quote for each year in the future your con is. Each market is different, but contact previous CC tech staff about what their costs were and compare them to vendors in your area.
—Bruce Mai, CC16