Hi David I am speaking as a local organiser here and not with my Carpentries hat on. What I did locally was create an eventbrite that was linked to my bank account as I managed all the bills for workshops. We have never had funding support for workshops here at The University of Queensland so we had to find the money to pay for room hire and catering. Once we planned a workshop and got quotes for room hire and food, we would price the tickets so that the ticket money raised would just cover those payments (and the eventbrite fees) with nothing left over. That worked pretty well as our workshops were always oversubscribed so I was never out of pocket. You could charge a tiny bit more if you wanted to create a float for next time. The benefit of eventbrite is that you can link to ticket sales through the workshop website, manage a waitlist, manage all the emails to learners etc - it really is useful. After the workshop, I would pay the venue via my credit card as the eventbrite money would always be paid out before the credit card was due. That might be a problem for students though who might not want to do that. Our charges were $55 to $60 for the workshop and people were generally happy to pay that. We could have provided less lavish catering and charged a lot less for tickets but people really appreciated getting hot snacks, cake, biscuits, and fruit, as well as tea, coffee and juice twice a day so that was generally a good selling point and it stopped people leaving to find food and being late back.
Whatever works really ... regards Belinda ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Tf549d7b277e0fae5-M3ba9616e79e410a1c2cf4907 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups
