Tea Party Events Arn’t Always Easy To Do…

By admin | November 19, 2009

Events are some of the most volunteer and financially intensive things your Tea Party organization can undertake. These will often require many volunteers to help make them a success. We often form our events around key speakers, our organization has been able to get two national level speakers come and speak to the public thus far. These were Tammy Bruce and Judge Andrew Napolitano, they were both great and we were able to get 5000 and 7000 people to come out respectively to the events.

Events generally require venues that can hold lots of people. Another consideration for your venue is that if you want to expose people to either conservative candidates or other conservative groups in your area, you may want to have an area to set up booths and for meet and greets.

Creating a successful event is not easy, but if done right you can expose a lot of new people to the conservative message. It will take a bit of planning to secure a location, you may have to have event insurance, also you may be required to pay police officers to be on hand. Along with that, you will have sound system considerations. Some venues will have this available as part of the venue, while at other places you may need to bring your own. Hopefully you can have a volunteer to provide this for your group. We are lucky in that we have a small business owner that donates his time and equipment when we need it.

Generally, to help with all the planning we have people that do different parts of the planning. The positions we generally use for events are, a volunteer coordinator, a special interest coordinator, an event coordinator, and a press and speaker relations person.

The event coordinator handles getting the venue and equipment arranged and all the details that go along with that: insurance, police, etc.

The press and speaker relations person works on getting the presenters for the event set up and contacting the media outlets to make them aware of the upcoming event.

The special interest coordinator works with inviting and setting up local candidates and organization that may want to come and set up booths in the meet and greet areas.

Finally, the volunteer coordinator handles getting the volunteers organized and keeping them informed of what is needed and how they can help on the day of the event.

Each event will be different depending on the goals of the event, but one thing that can be said is that Tea Party groups that have experience with Rallies and Forums most often will have success in coordinating large events. Events will also generally be expensive to pull off, so you need a good donation base established unless you have people that are willing to pay out of pocket.

Generally, your group will end up having to pay for the venue, the insurance, the police, any equipment that you don’t get donated, and a myriad of other expenses. Also, although some speakers will donate their time you will generally need to pay for their traveling expenses at a minimum. For some national-level conservative speakers you can expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars, for them to come and speak. Just be prepared for some sticker shock.

In future posts I’ll discuss bring in money to help fund your organizations ability to put on forums and events…

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