[Sca-cooks] Feast Alternatives

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    Hmmmm . . . y'all are lucky! One of the big problems we have is that
people are NOT bidding events. The next Crown List (labor day weekend) is
being hosted by a consortium of households, and all kingdom events after
that are still open for bids. I get a bit twitchy when I see the mad
scramble to find someone to do an event 3 months before the date . . .
    Part of it is that when you write up your bid, you specify what
percentage of the gate goes back to the kingdom. If you want to beggar
yourselves, you're pretty much guaranteed the bid. Of course, that means
your group kills themselves with nothing to show for it. OTOH, if you know
you're the only bidder (and kingdom is getting down to the wire), you stand
to rake it in bigtime! While I don't think that groups should regard kingdom
events as great money making opportunities, if they want / need something
with a large price tag, that was their traditional way of being able to
raise funds.
    We always use the same camp for crown lists & coronations, and the
kingdom has a standing deposit there. They front a rather niggardly amount
for feast, and that's pretty much it. After that, the group is on its own.
If they want to serve more than the mandated 150, it comes out of their
pockets. At this point, the handbook also says they should serve something
on arrival night, and breakfast, but lunches are optional.
    We're trying to work an arrangement that would allow the tavern to
handle those meals, and free up the entire feast budget for the feast
itself. When I was still doing kingdom feasts, about 25% of my total budget
went to non-feast meals. This should take a lot of the pressure off the
feastcrat, we hope. Not just on the budget, but also having to divert time &
attention away from the feast itself to do the other meals.
    We're also hoping that having that much more to work with will allow the
feastcrat to serve a greater number of people, too. The hall we use is
HUGE - it will seat twice the number normally served very comfortably. We
also used to use a sliding pre-registration discount, but that seems to have
fallen by the wayside, so there's no incentive whatsoever to make
reservations. The ones who do reserve for feast tend to be groups who want
to make sure there's seating for all - my house has been known to reserve
20+ at a time . . .

    Sieggy


-----Original Message-----


>What happens here is that interested groups put in bids for Kingdom level
>events.  The group with the best bid, determined mainly by the Crowns, but
>with input from a Kingdom event bid person, gets the event.  Usually the
>group fronts all of the money for the event, but if they don't have enough,
>the Kingdom will kick in with whatever is needed.  the feast can be as
large
>or small as desired by the group, based on projected attendance.  People
are
>beginning to learn that if they don't make reservations for the feast
early,
>they probably won't get on-board.  And our event fees are structured to
>encourage on-board reservations...prices are given both for a reservation
>including the feast (on-board) and for offboard (not including the feast).
>
>Profits are divided 50-50 by the hosting group and the Kingdom.  However,
if
>a loss is incurred, the hosting group eats it.  But it is a very rare thing
>that a Kingdom level event will lose money.  Even here in Dun Carraig,
where
>we normally get very small attendance for local events, we do very well on
>Kingdom events.  Even this past Kingdom Twelfth Night, when a snow storm
>prevented most of the south from attending, we still made a profit!
>
>Kiri