by SondreOverby
Improvising a mini convention
12:59 am in Uncategorized by SondreOverby
As I have mentioned in previous posts, Levanger stands out as a pretty strong juggling community with about 22 active jugglers attending the weekly juggling meetings. As it happens, I am their coach(yes, I get paid for that) and so I hold the keys to the gym where we practice.
Last year, 6-7 of these youngsters had got together for something that they called “Maximum Juggling Night” where they hung out and juggled for a full day and a full night, also watching juggling videos and the likes. Of course, they asked me to organise a repeat of it. But seeing as I have the keys for a gym, why not stay in the gym instead…? Splendid idea! So we did.
But once we were at it, we thought we might as well invite the rest of the 22 jugglers to come. And they did. But in the process of organising this, it became obvious to me that making it a full weekend would be a lot more fun, and so I stretched the name of the “event” and called it the “Maximum Juggling Weekend”.
So far so good – we were expecting about 23 people for the weekend, and I made a Facebook page. And quite soon it was obvious that a bit more people would turn up – the numbers soon hit 35, and with a free gym and no entry fee, I thought this was great. We were paying nothing but my free time for an event that “lots” of people would enjoy. In the end, it turned out that 40 people had attended in total, and looking back at this post, it seems that this which was pretty much just a “7 people hang out for a full day and night” that turned into “40 people get together for a weekend of fun”. And all of it was free.
Now what of this kind have YOU done lately? Get organising! Put together these juggling meetings for yourself and your friends. People came to our event travelling over 10 hours by train when they didn’t even know anything about the venue or the people there – what change would be brought about to the juggling community if every other club would do this a couple times a year?
Part 1:
Part 2:
I really like this idea, I live in Seattle, WA USA, and there’s not much around here… juggling-wise, I would love to start one of these… How did you manage to get the publicity out?
Well, we have a pretty big juggling community so it wasn’t very hard. But if you’ve got a small juggling community then this is what I would recommend:
1. Search for nearby jugglers that are within a travel range of 5-6 hours.
2. Get to know them through the internet.
3. Ask your parents, or someone, to help organise a small juggling event in a gym(maybe rent one) – and put up posters in your local area telling people about it, saying you’ll give free juggling workshops to anyone interested. You can be pretty sure to get at least SOME people there. Maybe write your e-mail so that they can contact you and sign up for it, so that it doesn’t get too crammed. This way you can probably “recruit” kids to your juggling club – well, of course you need one of those first, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you have 3 or more jugglers and a gym of some sort to use 3 hours once a week or more.
4. Keep the juggling club going, invite friends, and so on, for about one year.
5. Organise a new event.