What I observed at TCMAS`s Spring Swap

Me and Andy McClure went to Fridley, MN for the Twin Cities Marine Aquarium Society's Spring Swap promoting MACNA and I thought I would just post what I observed.
They don't charge for admission or tables to any of their events, but instead rely on donations. They said it is working for them. They weren't sure one way or another if they came up with more money from donations vs. charging, but they said they can get a LOT more people to their shows if they don't charge, and in turn vendors/sponsors are more willing to make bigger donations. I'm not saying we need to make things free, but it's something to think about. It seemed people were complaining about sharing tables to pay less per person before Spring Fest, having free tables and recommending a donation would solve this problem.
We need to get the date/location for Spring Fest 2012 locked down and get flyers made up. Do we even have flyers for this Fall Fest started yet? I saw they had flyers for their current event made up in their handout bags and I think they had flyers for their spring swap in their fall swap bag. It would be great advertising if we can get flyers for Spring Fest 2012 available at Fall Fest. It will also be much easier to ask vendors if they are coming to the next show if we have a date/location. At a bare minimum we need to put together a flyer for Fall Fest.
I talked to Matt Pedersen(breeding "expert") to see if he'd want to come to Fall Fest to speak. He said he should be done with the fishing season by than and sounded more than willing to make the drive. He would be great to have talk about raising fish currently breeding in your tank or even growing rotifers/phyto. I can ask him what it would take to get him down here if we want, not sure if we need to vote on this or not. It would also be cheap(and getting extra raffle items) to have Randy Reed come too.
Matt Pedersen was also there selling frags donated from his club(Lake Superior Marine Aquarium Club). This would be something cool to have for people to donate frags for selling at events to raise money for something for the club. Par meters, A/V equipment, etc...
At TCMAS's show, they had a few tables with chairs in the middle for people to meet up during the show. This would be a great idea for people who can't or don't want to walk around the whole time. We could have it close to the raffle table so people could see what's going on better. It would also be nice for people to sit around and meet each other, it would help grow some comradery within the club!
That's about all I can remember for now, maybe Andy will chime in with more.

 

Yea pretty much what I had in mind.

 

No speakers this year. Last year they had two speakers before the show and it was pretty well attended. Their show was in a VFW with a pretty decent size show room. They had 4000 sq. ft.
Here's their floorplan:

Their raffle table was elevated above everyone, so it was really easy to see what was going on from almost anywhere. They did a few tweaks right before the show for moving vendors around, but this is pretty much the gist of it. It doesn't look to scale though, the vertical open area on the left was about 3 times that wide with 3 tables and chairs parallel to the others in that row.  From looking at it, House of Corals was where YZ was, Petco was where HoC was, the PetCO table turned into a welcome table, and about 6 other vendors where there that weren't on the floorplan. There was also a table next to the welcome table where they sold merchandise(shirts, coolers, hats, etc.).