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13 In addition to the time demands on you and your team members—who may routinely be involved in numerous other activities in school and possibly several others outside of school and who will have heavy academic workloads—the other key limitation on the extent of your program will be funding. You can respond to this by lowering costs and generating revenue. Costs can quickly add up for a team. The lowest-cost conferences we attend are friendly evening scrimmages with local schools at an average cost of $8 to $10 per delegate (this usually pays for pizza and paper). A one-and-a-half-day conference sponsored by a local high school generally runs $20 per delegate, plus another $20 school fee. Moving a step up, college-sponsored conferences can run $40 to $60 per student, with an additional $40 to $60 school fee. Some colleges also charge a sponsor fee. The larger conferences, with thousands of participants, can charge even more—and that’s just the registration fees. Travel and hotel costs can soon become a problem. Staying local means keeping costs down, but limits the exposure of your team to better—or at least different —styles of competition and to different students. We discourage students from driving themselves to conferences. You can usually keep transportation costs down by relying upon parents to pitch in with driving to local conferences. However, every now and then you may need to rent a school bus. Some districts do not absorb the costs of the bus, which means a few hundred dollars coming out of your team’s budget. Renting a commercial bus for an out-of-area conference can get well into four figures. Transportation is a major opportunity to involve parents. Delegate the responsibility for lining up parent drivers to a parent or committee of parents. They are often looking for an opportunity to get to know the students with whom their children are spending time. This is their chance. Going to college-run conferences, even if they are local, will also greatly increase your budget due to hotel costs. Being within thirty to forty minutes of the campus or conference site makes it possible for you to be a commuter school; however, 3 Fund-Raising a disadvantage to this is that your students will probably miss some of the latenight /early-morning socialization with students from out-of-town schools that stay at hotels. Moreover, college students hosting MUN conferences find declaring midnight crises (generally running three to four hours) to be attractive draws. If you’re a commuter school, it probably means that you’ll need to get hotel rooms for the students who will be involved in these “surprise” sessions. (So make sure, when you are signing up for a college-run conference, that you know precisely which committees will have these midnight sessions, so that you can get better rates for the hotel rooms, rather than be truly surprised and have to scramble to get hotel rooms for your students. We do not recommend commuting in the wee hours.) Depending upon the area in which you’re staying, hotel rooms can go as high as $300 for a quad per night. When making hotel reservations, public schools should be sure to ask for the government rate as often it is less than the usual discount rate. One way you can shave a few dollars from transportation and hotel costs is to develop alliances with other schools. You can often save money by sharing the costs of a school bus/commercial bus with a nearby school’s MUN team. (One caution—and this has happened to us—get a cash commitment from the other school, so that if they pull out at the last minute, your school is not stuck with the additional cost.) Trains and hotels often offer group rates to twenty or more customers , a breakpoint you might be able to reach if you join forces with another school. (Alliances with other schools also allow you the opportunity to conduct joint practices, jointly host a conference [a great profit source], create joint delegations [if permitted by a host Secretariat], and e-caucus with your contacts among students and teachers.) Again, from experience, we recommend against adding students from other schools to your school’s conference delegation unless a teacher or other school official from that student’s school is a chaperone. Fund-Raising Ideas There are only so many ways that you can cut...

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