Crafts Report: Public Opinion

WHAT'S YOUR OPINION?

Each month, The Crafts Report invites readers to respond to the Public Opinion question. Responses are published in the magazine.

This month’s question is: Do you think the Internet will affect craft show sales?

Please respond by August. 8, 2002. Responses to this question will appear in the November 2002 issue.

E-mail:
publicopinion@craftsreport.com; or CLICK HERE

Send responses to: “Public Opinion,” The Crafts Report,100 Rogers Rd., Wilmington, DE 19801; fax: (302) 656-4894.

Anonymous responses will no longer be published.

The reason we do it for Crafts at the Cathedral, which is a fund-raising project for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, is simply to cover the cost of recruiting.

Our application fees are non-refundable because there is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done in handling the applications, whether the applicant is accepted or not, and it costs us money to actually stage the shows. We are a non-profit arts organization with a large building, accounting department, light bills, telephone bills, advertising, salaries, etc. We also have extensive exhibitions and education programming, and the art shows are one of the ways we raise money to fund that.

The concern for us is that [artists] show up and it is important to have a successful festival. If someone has paid, they will be sure to arrive.
We are Rotarians and a non-profit [organization]. We are about community service and we have many expenses to offset. After we pay our expenses, any money that is made is given back to the community in many ways — scholarships, etc.

Artisan Promotions produces the Christmas Festival in Hartford, Conn., in October and in Boston, Mass., in November.

We started producing shows 25 years ago and, at that time, had a jury fee to offset costs associated with gathering a group of craftspeople to look at slides. We did this for two years.

What we found was that the jury fees produced revenues that represented many times the cost of assembling a jury. It was actually embarrassing how much money we made on the jury fees.

So, we discontinued the jury fee. Now we just absorb the cost as part of the normal course of producing craft shows.

The application fee ($25) is for processing the slides, paying a jury honorarium and mailing craft-show flyers to the artists to notify them as to which shows they will participate.

Artists either mail the flyers to customers in our show’s area who bought from them in previous shows or take them to each show in advance of ours to advertise their presence. Mailing 100 to 250 (our limit) postcards is expensive. The application fees help offset these costs.

The application fee is non-refundable for the above reasons as well as for the difficulties involved in holding artists’ checks until after the jurying.

Can you imagine the bookkeeping necessary to return hundreds of checks to unfortunate artists who aren’t accepted?

The prospectus must be written, designed, printed and mailed. Applications have to be processed, which includes inputting all information into the computer, adding the application number to each slide, putting the slides into carousels and organizing them for viewing by the jury, printing jury scoring sheets, etc. Jurors are paid and reimbursed for expenses, such as airfare or mileage, hotel, meals, etc., when they are from out of town. There is substantial staff time involved in the preparations for jurying, during jurying, entering scores into the computer, balancing the show based on the scores, compiling, printing, stuffing and mailing jury results, etc. Also, having a jury fee limits the number of “What the heck, I’ll try anyway” entries. With no or a very low jury fee, you get too many of these types of applications, which must be processed along with the rest, and which slow down the jury process.