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HOW TO HOST A BROAD UNIVERSE PARTY OR TEA The great thing about Broad Universe are the parties — meeting new people, laughing, eating chocolate. To make it easier, here's how we do it. First, post a notice to the Broad Universe discussion group to troll for volunteers. The only tricky part is finding a room. Check the convention's website and send an email to the concom (convention committee) liaison asking what kinds of party rooms are available. The most expensive scenario is using a hotel's function rooms and having the hotel cater the food. Less expensive is using a hotel function room but bringing in your own food. (Many conventions negotiate with hotels to allow this.) There may be a fee to reserve the function room, and you'd reserve it through the concom. Even cheaper is having the party in your own room. On the up side, you won't have to pay anything to reserve the room and you can bring in all your own food. On the down side, you'll have to deal with the mess afterwards and stay in the party wing all weekend. If that's okay, you're golden. For a tea, you might have the option of using the consuite for an hour, or a sympathetic concom member might loan you the use of her suite. (The consuite is a room with munchies for anyone at the convention — you'll be providing tea and cookies to everyone who wanders in, but that also helps to spread the word.) Menu Planning For an afternoon tea, consider cookies, chocolate, tea and coffee. For an evening party, bear in mind that the best parties have food not offered at any other party. Try to make yours stand out — if it's a large convention that will draw in people from other areas of the country, stock lots of regional specialties like cheese in Wisconsin or smoked salmon in Washington/Alaska, or Moon Pies in the South. If you're attending a con in another country, bring sample-sized candies from your home. The Toronto bid party did this at Chicon and everybody was talking about the Canadian candies. Chocolate is always a crowd pleaser. If you have a chocolate factory nearby, see if they have a distribution warehouse that has periodic seconds sales. Or check an outlet mall, which almost always has a sweet shop that sells bags of imperfect chocolates at about half price. Be sure to have low-fat and non-sugar items for those with health conditions. Veggie trays work well, as do bowls of dried fruit and jerky strips. Kosher foods are good to think about, as a wide variety of people can eat them. Look for the circle K on the label. In the drinks category, alcohol always makes an evening party popular, but on the other hand, it's expensive. For sodas, caffeinated/decaf and sugar/diet are the two polarities. Aim to have as many options of those as possible. It's also nice to have at least one non-soda beverage because most parties don't. Tea, lemonade, Kool-Aid, apple cider, hot chocolate — those are all good. Have a pitcher of plain water if nothing else; most hotels will provide ice water if you ask. One glitch we recently encountered was hot water. You can get hot water through the hotel, but it might be expensive. Try to get one of the local volunteers to rent or borrow coffee urns and drive them in. And where you have a choice, a bigger urn is better than a smaller urn. Shopping How much you want to spend on the party depends on the size of the con and the depth of your pockets. We've seen people throw parties with just a couple bowls of chips. Stingy is no fun. On the other hand, we've seen parties that budget more than a hundred dollars just for alcohol alone. A good ballpark figure for an evening party is $50 if you're buying supplies at a store (not including alcohol). If you make the food yourself, you can spend less. Transportation is definitely an issue: if the con is in your hometown, you can make more of the food at home. If it's elsewhere, lean heavily on foods that transport well, or food you buy once you get there. For anything perishable, make it as late as possible, preferably the day of the party. Decor Tape up cover flats of women-authored books, CD covers of women's music, and copies of women artists' work. Check with the party pack organizer to get the Broad Universe party pack containing just these items. Print out and tape up statistics from the website, if you want. If you're inclined to have a wacky theme, you could have a dessert party or Medieval food night or stock the party with weird comfort food from your childhood. You can hold a Broad party, handing out Broad Universe stickers for Excellent Broad Hair, Best Broad Behavior, and so on. If the GOH is particularly fun, see if she'll go along with "Be Like (GOH Name)." The bottom line is set a great tone and the party will follow! If you're so inclined, assemble a party tape of women's filk music. Heck, see if you can convince some of the lady filkers at the con to provide live entertainment. Or just simply have a party. It doesn't have to be a big hoorah as long as it's fun. Advertising Send an announcement to the Broad Universe mailing list and to web(at)broaduniverse.org so we can list your event on the BU events page. Ask the programming person (listed on the convention website) if they list parties and teas in the programming booklet. That's the easiest, best way to get the word out. For evening and room parties, tell the concom liason you are hosting a party and ask him/her to include it in the con's official announcements. Usually this kicks in long before the con opens. Many cons also offer daily newsletters during the con itself, and you can get your party listed in that. Some cons post party lists on their websites. Announce the party online, not only at the Broad Universe listserv, but also send an email to all your friends and any other venues you frequent. If it's on-topic, wax eloquent ("Hot food! Hot broads! Hot fiction! What more could a fan ask? Come to the Broad Universe WorldCon party and find out!"). If it's off-topic, be more oblique ("Just so you know, I'll be offline this weekend because I'm going to WisCon and I'm also hosting a Broad Universe party there for women in speculative fiction."). Once you get to the con, expect to spend an hour the first day hanging flyers about your party on relevant bulletin boards and other posting sites. (Sample flyers are here on the website, feel free to print them out and use them.) Buy a handful of helium balloons if you can't think of anything else, and tie them to the doorknob. We have yet to see a hotel complain about that. Also at the con, cultivate word-of-mouth. Tell everybody who will listen that you're hosting a party, and what it's about. Or hand them a small invitation about the size of a business card that names the tea, the date, and the room number. You can make 50-100 in advance and fill in the room number later if you don't know that in advance. Hand out invites at signings and panels and everything else you can that features women writers and artists. Troll the dealer's room and art shows. Setting Up For a party in your hotel room, figure an hour to clean the room, get all your personal things out of the way, get ice, have the hotel staff bring you extra towels, set out food and beverages, and slap a sign on the door. Give yourself extra time if you're having the party in a hotel function room and/or going for the more fancy decorations, such as putting party bulbs in the lamps, hanging cover flats all over the room, stringing Christmas lights, or setting up an inflatable doll in a chainmail bikini. The Main Event Relax! Enjoy! It's your chance to pretend you're the most amazing party host you can imagine, even if it's not the real you. We're finding that guests like to be greeted at the door to assure them they've made it to the right place and to have one friendly soul to introduce them around a bit if they don't know anyone there. (Greeters can be drafted on the spot. Having rotating shifts of half an hour allows everyone some downtime to socialize, too.) An evening party can run as long as you want — from a few hours to all night. Three to five hours is probably average. We strongly recommend that you post firm opening and closing hours, especially closing. Don't leave that open-ended. Don't open your door until the official starting time, but for Heaven's sake don't be *late* opening it; that just looks awful. Afternoon tea is usually held at 4 pm, but you can push it up to the 3 pm chocolate hour. Evening parties rarely begin earlier than 7 or 8 pm or end earlier than 10 or 11 pm. Midnight is a popular quitting time, but plenty of parties run until the wee hours or later. Heck, you could have a "broad hours" party that doesn't close until 4 or 5 am! Cleanup Hosts are also responsible for cleanup. With several volunteers running the party, divide and conquer — some of you take setup, some of you take cleanup. You can also ask for cleanup volunteers as you are (gently if possible, firmly if necessary) shooing people out the door at closing time. Hint that this is another great way to get involved in fandom. (Just for the record, there is no better way to meet people than to pop up and offer to help with whatever needs doing. You'll never be turned down, it'll give you something official to do if you don't know anybody, and all night long you'll be introduced to folks with glowing remarks.) Please do not leave your hotel room a mess for the maids to clean up, that's just plain rude. If it's more of a mess than usual and you can't handle all of it, tip generously. If it's a total mess and you can't handle it, apologize to the maid personally and tip extravagantly. LEFTOVERS If leftovers are perishable — if they are normally stored in a refrigerator or contain eggs, milk, or meat — throw them away. No one needs food poisoning as part of their convention experience. For nonperishables like cookies, crackers, chocolate, vegies (but not the dip), there are several options.
What Else Do I Need to Know? Don't forget to set the Broad Universe donation jar prominently amid the food. Don't hide it in the corner somewhere, put it right in the middle of the best food in the house. A good donation jar is a wide-mouth quart canning jar with the Broad Universe logo taped on. It could also be a knitted uterus. Hey, whatever works. Don't let the jar go empty — seed it with a bit of silver at the start of the party to make sure it fills up. It's an old busker's trick but it does seem to work, somehow encouraging the universe to fill the container...like the jar gets to wanting more tips or something. Also tape a message to the jar — something like "Your generosity will return to you three times over." Or "Give generously. You may have been a publisher in a former life." You know, something funny and encouraging. You can forward donations to the Broad Universe treasurer at 923 N. Lawrence St., Tacoma, WA 98406. Make checks payble to Broad Universe. All donations go toward supporting the group, primarily paying website fees. Once those funds are assured, we can start working on other projects to help get the word out, like buying tables at bookseller and SF/F/H conventions. Put out a sign-up sheet or guestbook for folks to leave email and other contact info and offers to get involved. Don't forget the pen(s)! Also when you get home after the convention, please check with the party coordinator and mail the book covers, CD covers, and artwork copies either back to her or along to the next convention. And please post a party report to the Broad Universe listserv and let us know how it went. What would you have done differently? What was extra fun? Let us share your experience and give us a chance to let you know how much we appreciate all the hard work you've done. And revel in the fun. Checklist Months ahead of time:
Weeks to days ahead of time:
One day before the con:
At the con:
After the con:
--Compiled by Elizabeth Barrette, Amy Hanson, and the Sounding Broads
Sample Flyers Feel free to print out and use these signs and handouts (PDF files):
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