A manual meant
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This manual is a Wiki book. That means that all co-counsellors can contribute to its content and quality. Its aim is to bring together all the experience that can lead to really good CCI events, whether that is a Community Day, Residential Workshop or a big CCI workshop.
To share is to multiply...
Sharing your experience, your insights and your language skills feeds into an spiral of abundance. Here it will lead to more and better CCI workshops which in turn will make your heart sing and support people to use co-counselling more effectively in their lives.
How can you contribute
This helps people in the future to find easier your contributions.
If you want
Any improvement that makes the text more readable, more grammatically correct is welcome.
When thinking about restructuring this manual, be aware that its structure has been set up with the following in mind:
This enables people to read only the chapter that is relevant at a certain time while it prevents that one has to read the whole manual in one go. So any improvement that contributes to this readability is welcome!
If you would like to change this text, please contact me, Alan Trangmar. |
This is addressed to a CCI organising group, so “you” means that group. It is intended to be a complete guide to the small-business side of running a CCI; it mentions all the practical bits, but with a focus on money. This does not have anything to say about actual co-counselling! Actual financial decisions for any CCI event are to be taken by the organising group, this is a checklist of points to consider not a set of rules.
This is not a guide to choosing a venue, but be aware that the agreement you make with the venue has a big impact on your finances, especially the price per person and the minimum number of people (see Forecast number of participants). Negotiate! The venue may also be willing to negotiate on other matters such as the timing of deposit payments, see Cash flow forecast, and calculating the deposit you need.
Try very hard to get them to cover the key points in a written agreement, so that you don’t get surprises later. This means doing some of this work more than 18 months ahead, preferably 2 years.
Try to make sure the agreement covers everything the CCI will need from the venue – see The Last Week: Keep something in reserve. They are much more likely to promise a good choice of diets, or offer all day & late night tea + coffee, if you ask them before signing the contract, when they are still in sales-mode. After you’ve signed it, you are dependent on what they feel is reasonable.
The main cost at any workshop is the fee paid to the venue, but you will need to spend money on some other things as well. Here is a list of things you may wish to buy:
Some costs are per person but others (web site, organisers’ travel) are not. So for the budget you need to assume a number of participants for calculations. Be cautious.
If the venue want a minimum-number guarantee – and it is likely they will want something, if CCI is asking for exclusive use - be very cautious.
Historically, UK-Netherlands-Germany have usually had over 80 but this is not guaranteed, CCI UK 2013 had 69. Hungary-Ireland have recently been around 60, sometimes down to 50. One event a long time ago lost a lot of money, over 3000 GBP, since they promised 100 to the venue but only had 80. On the whole, numbers are declining slowly over time: 100+ was more common 20 years ago. In most people’s view 60 is still a reasonable minimum for UK-Netherlands-Germany but it would be good to have a lower commitment.
Adding the extra costs (divided over the budget number of people) to the venue price per person gives a base cost per person. This is the basis for all the subsequent calculations.
You need a cash-flow forecast including deposits payable to the venue and deposits from participants. Or in other words, every time you have to pay money to the venue, you need to be able to pay it! This means you need to forecast how many participants’ deposits you expect to receive by each key date, and calculate a deposit amount which means you can cover all those payments.
Here is one example of booking dates (CCI UK 2013). Be warned that your bookings will not necessarily follow this pattern!
Date |
Number of new deposits paid |
Total number of deposits paid by that date |
Percentage of total bookings |
31/7/12 |
6 |
6 |
9% |
27/8/12 key date * |
10 |
16 |
23% |
30/9/12 |
5 |
21 |
30% |
31/10/12 |
0 |
21 |
30% |
30/11/12 |
1 |
22 |
32% |
31/12/12 |
0 |
22 |
32% |
31/1/13 |
2 |
24 |
35% |
28/2/13 |
4 |
28 |
41% |
31/3/13 |
8 |
36 |
52% |
30/4/13 |
10 |
46 |
67% |
27/5/13 key date * |
8 |
54 |
78% |
30/6/13 |
6 |
60 |
87% |
28/7/13 start-CCI † |
7 |
67 |
97% |
During CCI (discouraged!) |
2 |
69 |
100% |
† The 7 deposit payments in the last month were all in the last week, though this does include 3 people who sent booking forms earlier but for various reasons had not paid when they sent the form.
* The “key dates” were when deposits had to be paid to the venue, so there was encouragement to book just before, see “price increases based on date” below.
If you start with a reserve of money in the bank then of course you can decide to use it to fund deposit payments to the venue if you wish. But even if you have a big reserve, it is sensible to ask for a deposit of at least 25% of “base cost per person”: you want participants to feel they have made a commitment! CCI UK 2013 asked for 36%.
It makes life much easier if everybody completes all their payments before the workshop starts – which is why you want to tell them how much they owe, see under Keeping track of the money.
But this can be difficult for travellers, who may have to pay a fee every time they transfer money; and some people are just late, or book too late. So “cash on arrival” (actual cash, or credit card to the venue) has to be another option. (Of course you can accept “cash on the second day” if you like, it makes things easier on the first night but harder during the event, the money-person has to keep on chasing people.)
By far the simplest option is to do everything in your own currency, assuming that is the currency in which the venue’s price has been set, immediately convert any foreign-currency payments to your own currency and credit people with whatever results from this conversion. Then ask people to bring local cash when they arrive and do a final adjustment at the door.
This means that people have to pay the cost of exchange (between 2% and 8% depending on how it’s done) but if you cover this from workshop funds then it becomes another cost which has to go into the budget. If you publish a price in another currency then, apart from covering the cost of exchange, you also need to accept the risk of a big change in the exchange rate during the year after you publish the price, which could mean a significant loss (or a profit!). To have people paying “cash at the door” in your currency, but against a price fixed in another currency, is very confusing.
If your event is in a better-off country (Germany, Netherlands, USA, UK) then you will usually only get people from Hungary and Israel if you can give them a big discount (i.e. if they can pay much less than the “base cost per person”). Incomes there are much lower and most people who live there will need big discounts to be able to travel to workshops in other countries. And there are also some people in the well-off countries who don’t have much money and who will only come if they can be given a discount. Money for discounts has to come from somewhere. Here are some options:
Warning: be careful if campers do not count towards the venue’s minimum-numbers guarantee. In CCI UK 2013 (which had a fairly large price difference), 17 of the 69 were campers.
Of course if you have a price increase almost a year before, to encourage bookings at the previous year’s CCI, then you can’t call it a price increase, because you don’t want to suggest that people who book during the year are paying an inflated rate, which might discourage them. Call it a “special early bird reduced price” or something like that!
It is up to you to set the amounts of the price increases, but be aware that if you set the very lowest early bird price below the “base cost per person”, then there may be a substantial number of bookings (23% in the example above) who would need subsidy from the discount fund: you probably don’t want to do this.
But be careful: if X is less than base cost then that’s a huge risk (unless you have a big reserve fund). But if X is more than the net cost per person then you will still probably need to give some people discounts below X, which is messing with the principle a bit.
If you become the first event to try this out, you also need to think about how it would fit with the other sources of revenue listed in this section, in particular “price increases based on date” (above) is important in encouraging early bookings.
Another variation could be to quote X = base cost and be quite explicit about the whole process, “this workshop will only include any less-well-off people if those people who can afford it pay a lot more than X: especially if you are from the home country please consider if you could afford to add 100 GBP/EUR”.
This is one possible process, based on the principles that (a) of course everybody would like to pay less! (b) some people will only be able to come if they are given a discount, they are the people you are trying to identify (c) it is more or less impossible for organisers to assess who is more “worthy”, or to know how much of a discount each person needs: one person may be able to come with 10% off while somebody else may need 75% off (d) it is reasonable, and in line with co-counselling principles, to expect participants to say how much discount they need; indeed there has been some (limited) feedback that people have found this a useful process for them to be forced to go through. So …
If you do all that then there is a good chance that you will be able to meet all discount requests!
Confidentiality: It is normal for all discounts, requests and results to be kept confidential between the requesters and an organisers group (perhaps a subset of the bigger group) dealing with this topic. The main rationale for this is simple privacy, people should be able to get a discount without having to tell everyone how much of a discount they need.
Not primarily a financial activity, but it has a large financial element, you need to have decided your finance policies before you can finalise the leaflet, and it is needed a year before the event!
You will probably not be able to meet all requests for particular rooms, in particular singles are often over-subscribed, so you have to choose who gets first choice:
Depending on the size of the deposit, some people may ask to pay a smaller initial deposit, working up to the full deposit amount over some weeks or months. So you may decide to work on “date of first payment”. It is up to you whether you accept any bookings with a zero deposit. Some organisers do this for travellers, who will incur an exchange cost in sending money across borders. If you do it, keep on eye on the impact on cash flow!
So be very careful about making commitments! It is quite unnecessary to confirm a room allocation as part of the initial response to the booking. Not even if they have booked very early, because you might get a lot of special-needs requests. Though of course people do need to be told how much to pay, before the event starts – see Full payment before it starts – or cash at the door.
It is common to get requests for “quiet please”, and so on: just make a note, and satisfy if you can when allocating rooms. But some people will only come if their special needs requests can be met:
Some people only put “single” in the room-preference box, with no alternative option, but unless supported by a justification, there is no special need, just put them into the normal prioritisation process as above.
But there are some people who can only sleep in a room with no other people in it.
It is your choice whether special-needs requests take precedence over people who booked earlier without stating any special need. In the interests of inclusivity you might try to say “yes” to all requests, this is up to you. If the request is very late (this does happen!), and you have already promised all the singles to other people, then you may have to say “sorry, singles are full”.
If someone says they need a single but cannot afford the extra price for a single, this is also a request for a discount, which goes into the normal discount process. (If they are still paying more than base cost, they may not appear to need support from the bursary fund, but if they push someone else out of a single, and that person would have paid the extra, this does reduce the total revenue of the event and has to be reflected in the forecasting spreadsheet).
There are also one or two people who may not ask for a single but who are notoriously loud: either due to snoring, or a habit of setting a loud alarm for 6am and then not waking up for it, or because they need a special machine when they sleep and that machine makes a noise. You can’t charge these people extra, but you might decide to give them single rooms anyway!
Lots of things can happen in the last week, for instance:
The normal method is to use spreadsheets, Excel or similar. You certainly need at least one organiser who is reasonably fluent in whichever tool you select, and you will also want to share it with the rest of the organising group, who have a legitimate need to see how things are going. So make sure there is a free & easy to use reader for the tool you are going to use. Excel has several features which help:
You will probably need:
If you do all this thoroughly then you could create personalised welcome letters, telling each person exactly how much they owe, and why: look up Mailmerge in Microsoft Word-Excel.
It’s good to have 2 people taking bookings, so that they can chat about any issues which come up, as a fallback in case of illness, and also because there can be 2 separate jobs: handling the online bank, and handling paper mail including paper cheques. The 2 people will need to share the bookings sheet by email, so both need to be able to update it.
There are many things which need to be done, and which have financial implications, or need to be passed onto the venue. These are normally done by other people, but make sure that all financial commitments are approved by the treasurer and included in the financial forecast.
Alan Trangmar August 2016. This started from a document describing the approach adopted at CCI UK 2013, but has been generalised and some changes have been made in response to comments from other workshop organisers.
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