Consulting for Growth
P. O. Box 5407
Diamond Bar, CA 91765
909-396-6843
Fax 909-433-2129
or 909-396-6845
Email Carl George

The content and schedule that has been tested and received well by various audiences can be seen at this link:
Schedule a one-day MEL Seminar.

The first option is that your church organize and conduct a training event for your own leadership.  You would commit to a budget for the event which would include my costs and whatever promotional, refreshments and facilities use costs as you would normally incur.  I would like to have a book table, and would appreciate a volunteer to staff it.  My itinerary would bring me in on Friday, spend Friday night with you or some of your leadership, and conduct the event on Saturday, from 8:30 am to about 4:30 pm.  I might return home Saturday evening, or spend the rest of the weekend speaking or consulting either in your church or another in the area before returning.  In this first option, you could invite some area churches, if you wished, but that would be an incidental matter.

The second option is that we add to the first option the work of greatly expanding the effort for the promotion, primarily by searching for cosponsoring churches.  You would invite like-minded churches to purchase a group attendance package or a block of tickets in advance at a special group price, and list them as a cosponsor of the event, if desired.  (See P.S. below for details.)  We have learned that mailing of brochures to area churches is very costly and no more effective than a simple letter with a couple of follow up phone calls to the key churches in a region, i.e., within an hour or two drive of your location.

In this option,

1. You would provide the meeting place and arrange for refreshments for registration time, and morning and afternoon break times.  (Sometimes a freewill offering can help offset break time refreshments costs.)
2. You would guarantee the presenter fee and travel and expenses.
3. I would give each sponsoring church two free copies of my latest book, Nine Keys to Effective Small Group Leadership.
   
4. I would bring resources for a book table.  (Would you recruit a volunteer to operate it for me?  It is a super-simple operation.)
5. We need to make a decision about whether it is possible to arrange for a lunch on premises and if so, how it would be paid for, etc.  One way is to take a payment ($5 or so?) at registration time and arrange for a catering team to make sandwiches, drinks, etc. for a box lunch.
6. If you wish to promote your event by direct mailings -- which I do not recommend for local church sponsors -- I could help by providing the designer artwork and arranging for the printing of self-mailing brochures and/or cards.  You would pay for the printing and shipping.  (They come out to about $.25/piece in quantities of 2,000.)  You would pay for postage via your nonprofit bulk mailing permit.  Your people would affix the labels.  I could provide you with address labels of churches in the region of your congregation.  Before you do that, you should know that experience has taught us that a better plan for local church sponsorship of events is that you use the local yellow pages.  You would then contact those congregations listed in the church sections that you would feel good about inviting.

As you discuss these ideas with your team, I will be available for questions, details, etc.  Let's keep in touch.

Blessings,

Carl F. George

P.S. -- Here is one way the seminar could work:  You would solicit churches that could be named as cosponsors.  They would "buy in" by purchasing either an "all you can bring group pass" or a block of 20 tickets at the early registration price of $25 each, for a total of $500, which they would be free to give away or sell to their own or other people.  (We need to warn them that individual walk-in tickets would be $30, so they would not want to sell them above that price, if they want to avoid misunderstandings.)  Your goal would be from 5 to 15 sponsoring churches, for a presale of 100-300 places.

The "all you can bring group pass" has been found to work well.  Recruit cosponsors, but allow each to bring as many people as they can for a cosponsorship fee, which I suggest should be $250 for a church under 250 in attendance and $500 for a church larger than 250 in attendance.  Of course, they would need to pay for lunches on a per person basis, however many they brought.  This eliminates tickets, and allows some churches to save substantially on their training.  We have not found that this incentive produces overwhelming numbers, so the offer to "bring as many as you will" has been practical and quite motivating.  Another reason to request names or head counts of anticipated participants, besides lunch planning, is to assure that you have set up enough spaces to accommodate all who come for the event.

Budget notes

Basic Budget:  What I would like to see in a budget is an honorarium of $5,000 plus travel and expenses and my own book table.  If you were to secure enough cosponsorships to cover some of your expenses, your own contribution would be reduced and your own people might be able to come at a greatly reduced rate.  (For example, if you were to secure 12 cosponsor churches at $500 each, your own people could come for virtually the cost of refreshments and lunch!)

Supplemental Budget:  Also, if you wished for me to expand my involvement with your local church or district to include meetings with your key leadership team for consultations on the evening before and the day following, we could do that for an add-on honorarium of $1500 per day.

Handouts

A twenty-five page handout with the overhead visuals used in the seminar can be examined.  It is in Adobe Acrobat.   It has lines for notes next to each slide.  For shorter download times, the handout is broken up into three shorter files:
mel98-99_1-24.pdf;
mel98-99_25-48.pdf;
mel98-99_49-73.pdf;
each of which is a .5MB or so and usually loads in under 5 minutes, with fewer disconnects.

A two-page structured interview used in the second session of the MEL seminar should be distributed in duplicate, so participants can use one during the exercise and take home a fresh, unused one.  It is available in .html at Debref9x.htm and in Adobe Acrobat 3.0 .pdf format at Debriefing_Interview_ver_9x.PDF.