Re: [Organizers] booking as a team?

The Palo Alto, California Contra dance has a programming committee with six or so members. The two main approaches to booking staff here are - send out a 'call for dates' to local callers and musicians; if they're interested in playing they let us know when they're available, and then a program is assembled, working in chunks of three months at a time. - Track out of town people who are coming to the vicinity for dance camps, etc, and sometimes solicit them for off-cycle (we're usually Saturday, but can have a special Monday) dates, or participate in tours or mini-tours where out of town people play local-ish dancers over a week or weekend. There's usually more lead time on this than on the other approach. I'm the "booking coordinator" for the committee, which means I send out the call for dates, collate the responses, and make a proposed schedule out of that. I circulate the draft schedule to the rest of the committee for responses; they might notice things I haven't. (I don't always get to our dance because I'm gigging elsewhere or have some non-dance thing going on, so it's good to have other eyes and ears who can note when bands or callers have off nights, show improvement, etc.) Another committee member tracks the out of town people more closely. Another committee member organizes our American Dance Week and assembles pre-and-post Dance Week gigs. To keep from getting all our hands crossed, we communicate on an email list, and we've recently taken to using Google Calendar to track dates that have been booked ahead of the regular booking cycle. This produces a lot of email but everybody on the committee is generally aware of what's going on. (It doesn't work so well when trying to figure out goals beyond our defaults of enjoyable evenings and nurturance of new talent, and I'd actually like a bit more face to face than we get, but it does work pretty well for divided responsibilities without a lot of conflict or confusion, and it's less work for me as booking coordinator than if I were trying to also regularly woo out of town bands and callers.) Whether anything like this approach would work for you depends on personalities - this is Silicon Valley and we're all fairly techy - and your particularities of booking. - Alan On 2/23/2014 9:52 AM, Dana Dwinell-Yardley wrote: