Re: [Organizers] Student rate

For the Country Dance Society, Boston Centre's 2nd Saturday series of contra dances at the Concord Scout House (www.cds-boston.org/american), last season we ran the admission as follows: $9 non-members, $7 members, $5 young people. I consider young people to be "21 and under." Typical attendance is in the range of 35 non-members, 20 members, 15 young people -- about 70 in total. I intentionally don't distinguish between young people and students, allowing for college-age people and home-schooled youth to be included--hence the term "young people." For the well attended, more expensive, twice-a-year, Scout House fundraising dances, we've set the price at $15 and $10 for young people, to acknowledge that our future is in the young people, and that having 10% to 25% young people (or more!) in the population is a good thing. For the 2nd Saturday dances, having 15 and more young people has certainly livened up the dance, and over time has kept the dance at break-even. On the "unable to pay" topic, our committee has always had several volunteers helping out, either at the door or cleaning up, so for those who want to pay, there's a way to come for free. On attracting (well...anyone), I think it is almost always a person-to-person thing. I think an interesting question to ask in any full hall of dancers is "Who here was introduced to dancing for the first time by a someone you knew?" and "Who came to their first dance on their own, without the influence of friends or a social group?" Also "Were friends influential on the second and third time you went to a dance?" I think the corollary for young people is that they will tend to arrive in clumps--with several people, bringing their social group to the dance for a new experience. I believe (on not much data), only with time to people make a dance their community. Larry Jennings called one aspect of the successful dance as "the place to be," indicative of a particular social experience. I think (also on not much data), that the population that might go to a dance is about three to ten times the number that will actually show up some particular night, and the long-term task of any organizer is to both expand that larger population (most effectively by various creative and person-to-person and introductory means), and almost completely separately, to persuade a goodly fraction of that likely population to come to "tonight's" dance, through remembered positive past experiences and the possibility of positive future experiences. In general, I don't think the door price is first, second or even third on the list of things that determine whether people will come to a dance. (And I suspect the people that "won't come" for another dollar will still come, if the dance series has the right attractions for them.) ~Mark Jones On 7/4/07, Chris Weiler <chris.weiler(a)weirdtable.org> wrote: