Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Event Planning Tips for Federalist Society Student Chapters
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_31-2009_06_06.shtml#1243811757
(though probably adaptable to many other groups):
1. Debates seem to get more of a turnout than lectures.
2. If you can't set up a head-to-head debate, for instance because
local professors (see below) aren't confident that they'll
entirely disagree with the visitor), set up a two-person panel, or
a talk-plus-commentary.
3. Events that involve a local professor -- a debate, a panel, or
even the professor's just introducing a guest speaker -- will
probably get more of a turnout, because it will bring in the
professor's local fans.
4. Publicize, publicize, publicize, using all the tools at your
disposal -- e-mail, flyers in mailboxes, postings on bulletin
boards, postings on class chalkboards, if your school allows that,
and whatever else you can think of.
5. For topics, the usual sexy ones are good: affirmative action, gun
control, abortion, church-state separation, campaign finance, and
the like. Other topics can work as well, especially if you can
find a well-known visitor who wants to talk about the things he
likes. But generally speaking the old standards work well. Even if
you feel that not a lot of views are going to be flipped on these
topics, sometimes you can succeed just by moving people from
unreflective support for the liberal conventional wisdom to a more
agnostic position.
6. If you want to bring in a relatively prominent speaker from out of
town, offer to coordinate with other chapters in your city, so
that the speaker can -- if he wants to -- give several talks on
one trip. This may substantially increase the chances that the
speaker will want to take the considerable time and effort that
modern airplane travel requires.
These are of course all guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules. For
instance, I've generally preferred to talk about slippery slopes,
never with a debater (it's not a subject that lends itself well to
head-to-head debates) and often without even a local commentator, and
that's generally worked out quite well. But I think that most of the
time, those guidelines will prove helpful.
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