Jack Corbett and I are trying a few new things at SQLSaturday #49 in Orlando this year (Oct 16, 2010) and I thought I’d share them here. We don’t know if they will work, but it’s fun to try!

1. As I’ve blogged about before, we’re going to have an afternoon popcorn break thanks to one of our volunteers. But being entrepreneurial, we’re going to try to cover our costs and a bit more by making it a sponsored event. We’re going to take bids from our already committed sponsors with a minimum bid of $100. Highest bid wins, we’ll make sure everyone knows who paid for the popcorn, and if they want, they can even bag it up for the attendees personally!
2. We’re going to ask each speaker to take two minutes right before the presentation starts and ask those in the room to introduce themselves to whoever is seated next to them. It’s a small thing, but it could be the beginning of a substantial change for SQLSaturday if we can get it working.
3. My original plan was to buy plain brown shopping bags with handles and stencil them with the event logo. I think that would work, but as we though about how to work with sponsors, we started to think that stickers/labels might work better. Our revised plan is to invite sponsors to send us stickers up to bumper sticker size and we’ll have volunteers apply, or they can bring to the event and hand out and we’ll try to get attendees to apply on the spot. If it works we’ll wind up with some ‘designer’ bags! I ordered 250 bumper stickers with the SQLSaturday #49 and oPASS logos for about $160. Not quite the savings of Plan A, but I think Plan B could be a lot of fun.

For those of you planning an event I’ll challenge you to try new stuff. Look for ways to make it fun and to engage the attendees. At worst it doesn’t work and you try something else the next time. It’s fun to experiment.