In my previous post, I promised that I would make a second blog with tips about hosting an on-farm event, which would be written post-event rather than pre-event. While my previous points stand, I also have three new points from a post-event perspective. This can also be taken as a list of things I will do differently next year.
1. Have vendors pre-pay and fill out a form/contract. This time around, I sort of gave vendors the "option" of prepaying but didn't strictly require it. I suppose I was a bit naive for thinking that every vendor that said they were coming would actually come. Thankfully, many of them did come, but there were a handful that never showed. To make matters worse, I didn't think to get the phone numbers of vendors who emailed me, which made it more difficult to touch base with them. In the future, I will be requiring vendors to send payment along with a form listing all of their contact information and explaining that fees are not refundable after a certain date if they do not show. I am told by an experienced vendor that this is the norm, and it will definitely help with three things:
1. I will have multiple means of contacting vendors pre-event.
2. Vendors will have a greater incentive to show up and I will not lose money from no-shows.
2. Vendors will have a greater incentive to show up and I will not lose money from no-shows.
3. I will be able to avoid awkward end-of-day, "you need to pay me" conversations. Yes, that happened. No, it was not fun. But organizing and hosting events like this takes literally hundreds of dollars and if you don't get paid, you don't make it out of the red.
2. Pre-make food and freeze it. In Tennessee, it is illegal to serve or sell homemade "high risk" foods (mostly things that need to be kept at a certain temperature) to the public without an inspected facility. However, the serving and selling of cottage foods generally considered safe (like jams, jellies, and breads) is legal. With this in mind, I decided to make the desserts for our conference lunch. Legally I had to have the actual meal catered, but I still wanted to have that nice homey touch. We're pretty darn good bakers in my family, and our desserts were a hit.
However, staying up until midnight the day before the conference was not so much fun. I wanted the desserts to be freshly made, but I was not thinking about how difficult it would be to finish all the last minute touches to both the venue and the classes I was preparing and then bake three different flavors of dessert the day before the event. Why it never occurred to me to make them ahead of time, freeze them, and thaw them for the event I do not know.
3. Add extra time between classes. I schedule each class for a 1 hour period. The plan was to allow each speaker 45 minutes of lecture and 15 minutes for a Q&A session. This didn't really work out, however, because speakers -- including myself -- talked over 45 minutes, and time ran out before all questions could be answered. This wasn't a huge problem all in all, but next time I will plan a bit more padding into class times to give plenty of time for the next speakers to prepare in between classes, questions to be answered, and people and their belongings to be shuffled around to the next class.
4. Schedule the shortest classes before lunch. A couple of the classes were shorter than others. There just isn't as much information for some subjects as there is for others. Next time I want to place the shortest classes right before lunch and save the longest classes for after lunch. Lunch, because it is delivered at a certain time, really needs to happen on schedule so that the food stays fresh. That's a little bit easier to do with the shorter classes scheduled ahead of the lunch hour.
5. Don't forget to take pictures! I was so caught up in what was going on that I completely forgot to take pictures during the conference and only took a few during the festival. I was certainly kicking myself for that afterward!
Bonus! 6. Schedule a relatively short festival. I learned this through experience and through sage advice from an experienced vendor. Not many people come to a festival very early in the morning and few come in the late afternoon. Our festival rush was between roughly 9 am and noon, with a few stragglers after noon and literally no one earlier than 9 am. We decided by three that anyone who was going to come already had and let all the vendors pack up and head out. Afterward I spoke with one of our vendors (who was also a speaker) and among the many great tips she gave me was to schedule festivals for roughly 9am-3pm. Especially for people with children, getting out early in the morning or staying into the dinner hours is difficult, and only very large events like state fairs (which have a ton of hearty food offerings as well as nighttime entertainment) can pull off longer hours.
I hope this is helpful!
Cheers
