Hosting/running events

[NotHisRealName]

(Dont know if this should be posted in this forum or not)
Wondering if anyone has been involved in hosting a footbag event. Not necessarily a comp, more like a mini festival?
I'm thinking of organising a footbag/juggeling festival down here in Australia. Some fire stuff and tribal music and stuff.
Anyone able to give me some tips?
Our club has hosted a small comp once, but that was realy small and we were all just novices at footbag. Now, our skill is slowly getting up there and I think we're due for another event.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
cheers.

[Paulsator]

Even if some people dont think so, MONEY IS really important to set up a decent event, which everyone, the players and the audience, enjoys...
so dont procrastinate getting good sponsors, who not only give you their stuff (ie. puma gave us for the german open lots of shoes, wristband, shorts, etc.), which for them is just a form of product placement and advertising, but also really give you money (warning: dont sell yourself out for too little money, footbag is still a form of highly developed art).
in the end the german champs cost a lot of money and since we didnt have enough sponsors we had to pay most of it ourselves...
also, if you wanna have a great audience you should advertise your event well in advance...
hope i at least helped a little...
paul

[Rob]

Hosting events is a BLAST! Especially if you get lots of people you've never played with before to come. Setting up crash space and players parties alone are worth it, not to mention all the shredding you get to do with people!

It's not easy though...but well worth the effort. It takes some good preparation and whatnot though.

[floyd]

Yep, Rob's right, it can be a lot of work. However if you get your local council behind it you can get them to do a lot of the work. You will have to sacrifice some of your ideas and adopt some of theirs though. If you go to them with a very community based event it they will definitely give it a second thought.

If you don't want to do that, you will want to go in conjunction with another event with a decent budget (unless you have the wicked CASH sponsors). Allows for all the nice stuff (DJ's, MC, media coverage etc) you want and you get the bonus of being able to steal the crowds they attract. Email me if you want to chat more about your proposed Australian event.

[NotHisRealName]

Thanks, guys.
It's only a pipe dream at the moment, but I'll let you know what comes about.

[bake]

I just got finished organizing the Seattle Juggling and Footbag Festival. The key is to get SPONSORS! We had some great sponsors and we allowed them to come and set up booths for a cash donation. Some donated $200 some less. The money allowed us to get space and pay for t-shirts and misc. Then we charged the footbag competitors to compete and all the $ from that whent right back to them for prize $. We charged $5 for a weekend pass to everyone else.
It is a lot of work but you have to offer something for both jugglers and footbaggers. We had tons of workshops from beggining 3 ball to street footbag (Allan). Then we had a public show on Saturday night that we advertised heavily. It was a great event the jugglers really took well to footbag and the same with footbaggers towards juggling.
Good luck!
Matt