A Room With A View

This past weekend was the Orangebelt O-Vent, the other combined Official Visit and Association Event, like the one put on by the San Diego area last February.  This one was held at a winery, with wine tasting and tours in the morning and a lovely gourmet lunch and program after.

Because this was the other O-vent of the year, I heard some similar feedback to that in San Diego, about how members should not have to pay to attend the Official Visit to their area.  Ironically, this event could have partially solved that problem, but it didn't quite happen that way.  The reason is because the wine tasting morning made for a wonderful social time.  Even people who don't like to taste wine could socialize and chat with friends.  What probably could have happened, because the wine tasting area was a big outdoor area with plenty of seating and tables, is that it probably could have been arranged so that people who were not going to attend the lunch and program later could come during the social time, just to chat with the Grand Officers and meet people.  Everyone paid for their own wine tasting, or not, if they didn't want to, so that was a totally voluntary cost.  And there was plenty of room.  But it just didn't work out that way.  Maybe another time.

The other thing that struck me about the O-Vent format is that technically, you would not have to charge people to come if the Chapters wanted to pay for the event instead of charging the attendees.  The first Official Visit of the year was like that, where we had a splendid dinner and entertainment evening and no one paid to attend.  The Chapters followed the formula in our rules where each Chapter paid its share of the cost of the event, based on their proportionate share of the membership in the District.  So a Chapter with 100 members would pay half of what a Chapter with 200 members would pay and so on.  That is the traditional way that OVs are paid for and you could have a dinner/entertainment OV and do that, as we saw at the beginning of the year.  But you'd have to plan it a bit ahead of time and get your estimated cost for the Chapter into the Chapter budget the year before the OV so that people wouldn't be surprised about the increase in cost.  Still, that way, no one would be charged a ticket price and Chapters with more attendees would get more value for their dollar, so more attendees would be better since the amount each Chapter pays is dependent on their total membership and not based on who shows up.

As my planning process continues, I will need to find out what areas would like to try this O-Vent sort of thing, who wants an Association event unrelated to the Official Visit and what other things people want to put into the calendar.  As usual, everything seems to need to happen earlier than you might think because each O-Vent changes the number of Official Visits that I have to fit into the calendar.  So the decision on whether to do that or not may have to happen sooner rather than later.  But I think that it will probably be necessary to either have a free portion of the event so that members can come and meet the Grand Family without paying or the entire event will have to be free of charge with the Chapters each paying their per capita share as set out in our Constitution.  It is definitely something to think about, now that we have seen two of these and have gotten some feedback from our membership.

Next weekend I have work commitments close to home and I have books to review, so I will not be traveling.