I have question for those of you that are active in FF’ing clubs that have regular meetings featuring a presentation or speaker. Does your club give the speaker anything for doing the meeting’s presentation?
I realize that some clubs are large enough to occasionally bring in a “name” speaker and that those folks may require a fee and travel expenses. But that is not the situation I’m asking about.
I’m wondering what you do, if anything, for local people that come and talk at your meetings? Our group is still new, small, and broke so we use “volunteer” speakers. We have helped some of them with gas money type of expenses, but otherwise we don’t really do anything for the speakers to thank them.
So, we’re kicking around the idea of putting together a set of flies from the club’s tiers. Basically, get a half dozen or so tiers to donate a dozen flies to the club and then each month we could give a set of each of the flies to that month’s speaker. Maybe even have the tier’s sign the fly boxes that we give out. Each year would be a different set of flies. This would just be a simple way of trying to say thank you someone that comes to talk to us.
What do other clubs do for their speakers? What do you think about the fly box set idea? Does a fly box sound like a reasonable gift or would you be insulted to receive something like that?
Mr. Castwell, I sure won’t argue with your decision. I’m sure there a lot of similar incidents that occur.
But, I?m wondering about the other end of the spectrum. What is an appropriate way to say ?thank you? to the folks volunteer their time for free to put together a presentation and come to a meeting to talk to us? It just seems like we should do something. I was just wondering what other clubs do.
The club here is fairly small and not too cash heavy. When we have had guest speakers, they are usually from somewhere fairly close - usually within 200 miles. We can offer a small stipend and travel expenses, but not much. Can’t afford the “big names” that demand the big bucks. Some of our guests have been nice enough to do a program for free - very generous of them. In that case, we make a thank-you gift of a club cap and mug.
CJ
The only limitations we have are the ones we put on ourselves.
Rex,
I LIKE the flies idea. Might even “shadow box’em” for the guy.
I, for one, am more interested in what the “regular” guy is “experiencing” than the big name guy. Often though, the regular guy isn’t into doing presentations.
…lee s.
We pay travel expense and a dinner with one of the board members. Some have a set fee of $100 to $150. Recently we had Bob Clouser,it included air fare a dinner and a fee. Bob donated two mated prints of his flies and a number of flies that he tied. If the speaker ties we auction those flies.This month the speaker will be from the DNR, free with dinner and a box of flies. Club members will donate time to show their skill in bamboo rod building to tying.
Once a year we have the club auction of member donations to pay for 4 or 5 speakers thru the year. The auction this year brought in $1200. None members are charged to attend meatings.
Rex,
Our club pays traveling expenses and someone takes the speaker out to dinner. We also present them with something at the meeting, usually a cap with our club logo on it.
Steve
“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went”-Will Rogers
[This message has been edited by biot midge (edited 07 April 2006).]
For the regular meetings of Winter Hatches - Toronto we have presenters from a radius of about 40 miles. We have a number of club items that we sell at our tying Symposium and to club members. So like the others we give the speaker a club hat, knife, vise base or slant-box (for viewing floating flies). We have purchased sets of fly fishing stamps and had them framed. I like your idea of a set of flies tied by the club.
In our case, often the speaker (since it may be a guide or shop owner) will donate from 6 to 12 flies for the evening (matching the presentation) and we raffle them off to make some money. Or the local fly shops often supply 6 flies for the raffle to match the presentation. Only when someone comes from about 60 miles away do they get dinner and gas money.
Greg Herring [url=http://www.winterhatches.org:c2120]www.winterhatches.org[/url:c2120]
I am a member and past president of the Peninsula Fly Fishers on the San Francisco Peninsula. We have 12 general meetings a year. Two of them are dinner meetings with no speaker (installation of new officers in July, and Christmas dinner in December). The rest of the meetings have speakers. We generally expect to pay our speakers. We have 120 to 130 members. Dues are $30 a year. With this plus money we make from raffles at each meeting, and from silent auctions of flies tied and contributed by members at the dinner meetings, we cover out operating costs including the speakers. Some of our speakers are free–members programs, or conservation organizations. We usually have one big name a year and that can run $500 to $700. The rest of the speakers tend to be guides, generally from somewhere within California. Along with some amount of honorarium, we usually pay mileage and overnight accomodation for them. In some cases members have put them up in their homes to minimize the expense. We have tried to coordinate with other FFF clubs in Northern California to minimize the expense of getting a big name from out-of-state in the same time frame
I sit on the board of Three Rivers Fly Fishers with William Fitzgerald. Our club is about 95 strong now and ten years old. We meet monthly from August thru May and have club fishing outings each month in May, June, and July, one of which is in Michigan. (the club is located in Fort Wayne, IN.)
We sort of expect to pay in the $100 to $200 range for a speaker each month. Sometimes we are able to get free speakers, in which case we offer to pay their gas, buy them dinner, even a hotel if they are far enough away to want to stay over night. If we have a “big name speaker” we will have some sort of special fund raiser to pay for it. When we had Bob Clouser last April we were spending the proceeds from a raffle we ran for 6 months or more the year before on a Water Skeeter. We have discussed having a special raffle to bring a noted fly fisher to the club every couple of years. WE don’t want to do it every whip stitch for fear of becoming a club that’s always trying to get in your pocket.
We do usually have a raffle for $1/ticket at each meeting with maybe 2 or 3 items as prizes. Purely optional, but usually generate $30 to $40 a month from that.
Our club sponsored outings are a pay your own way affair. WE simply make the plans or reservations and hang the club banner when we get there. We may have a meal that is shared, either by people bringing food to share over a grill, or chipping in to a pot and one Board member goes into town for burgers and brats, tater salad, etc. These are the times when we really get to know other members and plan to fish with different folks.
We rent a space for our monthly meetings although it is very reasonable and pretty centrally located to our membership area. I will say that in the time I’ve been on the board we have operated in the black as a no-profit group. Some times we have had more in the check book than others, but it has never run dry. We have a good board that has come up with some ideas to increase our membership and fund raising. I think we are a healthy club from that aspect. Our single biggest expense it our newsletter, which is published monthly. Printing and postage keep going up.
These are the idle thoughts that posses a man’s mind when he’s not able to fish.
Our Club is about a 1000 members. We typically pay the mileage expense for our speakers. We also buy their supper and give them a club hat. They generally are local speakers (we do have a number of regionally and national known people to draw from). This summer we are bringing in a nationally known still water fisherman from out of state and paying his expenses. We are going to charge a fee to attend plus we are going to have a raffle (additional cost) for a change to have “on the water time” with him the following day. He is going to donate a few copies of his most recent book to the raffles.
On a monthly basis we have fly tiers from local shops come and demonstrate their craft for the first half hour of our meetings. Many wanting to come back again as soon as we can schedule them.
We also have a monthly bucket raffle.
The biggest donation effort is our yearly fly tying clinic which seems to be highly anticipated each year by both the regional tiers and the fly fishing public.
I like the idea of giving guest speakers flies except a number of our speakers are well thought of or famous fly tiers in their own right.
Besides the noted fishing personalities or flyshop owners, we have had speakers like a state congressman, an outdoor newspaper collumnist for a regional paper, and Department of Wildlife officer. One of the most interesting talks we have had was a manager from the local water district. I thought it was going to be a very dull talk but turnd out to be very interesting He gave an interesting a talk about how the waters come down from tier level streams in mountains and go through thier water inpoundments and the water treatment system to our houses. He also talked about other instream flows they deal with( from our commodes etc) and how that is treated and returned to stream down river.
We have had a couple of other of the wall speakers, which I can not remember at the moment, interesting talks that ended up relating to fishing somehow.
Ours is a small club. We just completed our 20th annual weekend fly fishing basics class. This is our only fund raising activity other than minimal dues and everything we raise via the class is donated to several stewardship organizations to help with their work (e.g. Kinnckinnic River Land Trust, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, etc.). With not a lot left to spend on “name” speakers we fimd lots of interesting programs among club members, folks from other area organizations, the DNR, journalists, artists, guides,etc. Our meetings are held over dinner at a favorite local restaurant and our standing offer is to pick up the dinner tab for the speaker. This has served us well for many years. We get good programs and they get a good dinner, often with a glass of wine or two.
I want to say THANK YOU to everyone for your comments. I hope you don’t mind, but we’ll shamelessly steal some of your ideas.
Greg, thanks for posting your club’s web site. It is interesting to see what other clubs across the country are doing. We’re down in Texas and here’s our site [url=http://www.rrff.org:3e92c]www.rrff.org[/url:3e92c] .
I’m the program director for a 300 member club in the midwest and we bring in 8-9 speakers a year.
Our speakers are our honored guests and we try to feed & water them accourding to their tastes, however, what we pay them varies greatly. Sometimes its no charge, sometimes its a flat fee, sometimes its travel expenses, sometimes its a fee plus expenses.
The name speakers usually ask for a fee plus expenses but every speaker is different. Cheers.
[This message has been edited by crcaddis (edited 11 April 2006).]
I am also in a club of about 1000 members. We also pay expenses and a fee for our speakers. Manu of the locals and members either waive the fee or donate something back (guest tiers often donate the flies they tie).
I like the idea of having members tie flies, but what about raffling or auctioning the flies and giving the money to the speaker?
