[ST] A big question about comps

[Skip Morris]

For Staff or Program comps, there's a pre-defined "contribution" to Arisia that
gets a person a full-weekend comp.  (Usually 12 hours or three program items.)

For Events it's less well defined.  There are a huge number of people involved
in events.  For things like Rocky Horror, or a Masquerade Half-time Presentation
you might have upwards of 50 people coming in for that one item.

Other Events last multiple hours. Examples are Junk-Yard Wars, or the Period
Dance. For the Period Dance (for example), sometimes the organizer recruits
6-8 people to serve as "ringers", getting out on the dance floor and serving as
examples and encouragement to get others out there and participating.  Should
these people get comps?  Some event organizers think so, some don't.

What happens it the poor Events/Ops/Exhibits/etc DivHead gets hit with many
demands for a comp memberships in return for sometimes minor contributions
to the convention.

If you give out too many comps it really can impact the budget. That's one of
the reasons my convention lost money.  Final expenses were right on target,
but income was way down due to a huge number of comps given out. Comp
memberships probably cost my convention $10,000.

I'm not sure of current numbers, but in past years comps have been 25% of
total memberships, with earned comps being about half total comps. (Someone
with better numbers can correct me.)

/Skip

On Dec 5, 2007 2:34 PM,  <SciFiFanBoston at aol.com> wrote:
> Are we talking about people like Higgins Armory people, or people on doing
> the D.J. work, or people helping out say putting up the stage?  I'd like to
> think that all of our comps are full-weekend pre-earned... but I'd be
> thinking wrong, huh?  So, just how many day-comps or are they actually
> full-weekend comps like all our earned comps are?