NJCL 2008

Fall Planning: Nuts and Bolts

Posted by Brian at 12:25 pm on Thursday, October 25, 2007

OK, time for a peek inside the sausage factory.  The thing that the local committee does most, from the moment they know when convention is up until Fall Planning, is work on scheduling.  We’ve dealt with the schedule three separate times in the last month, with two of those being back-to-back days at Fall Planning.  Truthfully, though, there isn’t much else you CAN work on except for the Invitation- so many details are decided at Fall Planning that affect Convention that you really can’t do many other things until that’s over.

This process started for us in the fall of 2005.  We’d learned we’d been chosen for the 2008 convention, and we knew we had to start tackling facility reservations right away.  Martha Altieri, NJCL Convention Advisor, sent Steve and I a packet of things the site required; if the site didn’t have these, it was a deal breaker.  Things we made sure we locked down right away (and again, this was 2 1/2 years ago):

1. General Assembly space for upwards of 1600 people;
2. Beds for same, preferably air-conditioned;
3. Sports facilities for Olympika and Ludi;
4. Dining Hall (or Halls)
5. Room for Graphic Arts (this is a rather large space that needs to be isolated and off-line for the whole week).
6. Space for large meals (Sponsor/Chaperon Banquet, SCL Banquet, State Chairs Luncheon)

Numbers 1 and 2 are key, and they are also being sought after by many other groups, so jump in these soon.

We met with the conference staff in September of 2005 and laid out our needs for the convention.  Once all these were set, we began deciding what would go where.  We went to the campus a number of times over the course of a year and a half scouting sites.  We were lucky that, being alums, we already had a number of ideas of places to use; if you’re not familiar with the campus, plan to either spend a lot of time on this personally, or communicate very clearly to the conference staff what the sizes of events will be.

Once the Tennessee convention ended, we got down to business on actually mapping out the schedule.  Steve used an Excel spreadsheet Martha provided to plug in the events; he also made a bar-graph style representation of each day to show overlapping events.  This was very helpful in that it showed everyone how little conflict was actually taking place.  Steve and I went through the schedule once before meeting with our conference staff again this September.  We looked over everything in brief, focusing a lot of our attention on the last two days and all the special activities going on.  We did some thinking about what we liked and didn’t like about recent conventions and adapted the schedule accordingly.

Then we met with Pam and Marilyn, Miami’s conference people.  We looked at every single event in the program and discussed where it was going to be.  We also had to explain a lot of these things to Pam and Marilyn as we went, as well as arrange logistics for each event and location, down to the smallest things such as arranging for office equipment for the JCL Desk and deciding what Geri and Mary needed.  Again, all the things one never thinks about.  The meeting took over three hours, but we had given the conference staff as complete a picture as possible of what was going on.  We also had our plans for the Fall Planning meeting in place.

Later I’ll post on how the schedule held up under the National Committee’s scrutiny.  I’ll say this now- we made A LOT of changes. 

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