How USQ Selects Event Locations
Good afternoon! This is Alicia, USQ’s Acting Executive Director. As you’ve probably seen, yesterday we announced the dates and locations for our 2015-2016 event lineup. Event bidding and selection is almost a year-round process, and I want to provide more background and context for how the process works and what goes into our decision making.
First of all, what does event bidding mean?
In the sporting event industry, organizations looking to put on events - like USQ - and city agencies looking to bring events to their areas - like convention and visitor bureaus (CVBs) or sports commissions - find each other through a series of industry trade shows and conferences. For the last three years, USQ has worked with the firm OAN Sports Marketing to represent USQ at conferences like the NASC Sports Event Symposium, S.P.O.R.T.S Conference, TEAMS Conference, and US Sports Congress. There, our representative Joe Pickett has one-on-one appointments with city representatives to pitch our events. At the 2015 NASC symposium, for example, Joe met with 84 cities from every corner of the country - cities who are thinking about bidding for the 2016-2017 event season.
After the conferences, interested city representatives decide if they want to formally bid on one of our events. Each representative has a copy of our bid manual, which lists all the requirements needed to successfully host a USQ event. From the city’s point of view, there are a lot of considerations that go into which events they host:
Facility space - Does the city or county have the right kind of facility space? For nationals, we need facilities that have at least six regulation soccer fields, ideally already well-lit or at the least, with the ability to bring in lighting. Some cities that have hosted regionals would love to bid on nationals, but don’t have large enough facilities.
Event size - Many CVBs are funded by a percentage of hospitality taxes on hotel room stays. When they bring an event to their city, they need to know that there will be an economic return for the CVB and the city at large. This is why a Stay & Play policy is important. Quidditch is still a brand-new sport, and many cities are unsure what their economic return would actually be from one of our events. Each year we have more data to give cities a better idea of their return - the $917,000 economic impact that Rock Hill reported after World Cup 8, for example, will be a significant help when other cities are deliberating whether to bid on nationals.
Timeline and budgeting process - Many cities are used to bidding for events two, three, or even more years out. Almost every city has a limited budget and they choose carefully which events to bring in at which times. The City of Richmond is hosting the UCI Road World Championships in September - and they bid on it in 2010. When I visited Richmond and Henrico County in 2014 for our regionals site visit, the city was still deep in preparation for that event. Because USQ is still building relationships with cities, and because players like the possibility for locations to rotate, right now we do not yet accept bids farther out than two years.
City culture and visibility - Several of the cities we’ve worked with continue to bid on quidditch events because they are a unique and fun opportunity for the cities’ residents, and because our events bring a level of media attention that a basketball or softball tournament just can’t match. Additionally, you see a lot of smaller cities and suburbs bidding on our events. These are cities that want more visibility, and want to build up their own unique culture. When Alex Benepe moved to Los Angeles last year, the first thing he did was set up a phone call with the LA CVB. But a city like Los Angeles doesn’t need to bid on events - everyone already wants to host events there, so they don’t need to offer  any economic incentives to event hosts.
For these reasons, although Joe meets with a lot of cities at conferences, and maintains ongoing relationships with them, a small percentage submit final bids. For the 2015-2016 event season, we received 22 total bids: three for nationals, and 19 for regionals. Two of our nationals bidders also bid on regionals, so that’s 17 unique bids for 8 regional events (and as you know, four regions were uncontested - meaning they only had one submitted bid).
In order to protect the privacy and our relationship with all bidding parties, I can’t tell you beyond the finalists who bid in each region, but here is the breakdown for regionals:
Great Lakes - 1 bid
Mid-Atlantic - 6 bids
Midwest - 2 bids
Northeast - 1 bid
Northwest - 1 bid
South - 3 bids
Southwest - 1 bid
West - 4 bids
Why is the Mid-Atlantic so excited about quidditch? Each city is different, but I can speculate: the Mid-Atlantic does have the benefit of being close to previous large quidditch events, from the more recent World Cups, to World Cups IV and V in New York City. In the world of sports tourism, quidditch events are some of the newest and riskiest events out there. As you can imagine, the decision to bring any event to a city requires the buy-in and approval of many different parties, each of which have their own priorities. Cities ask themselves: will they have the attendance rate they say? Will they fill enough hotel room nights to make it worth it? Can this young organization successfully host an event of this size?
It’s easier to convince a city to bid when they can call a neighboring city (who they know well, because CVBs are generally regionally connected) and get answers to each of these questions. We know that puts the rest of the country at a disadvantage, and that’s why Joe goes out of his way to target CVBs in other parts of the country at conferences. But with each successful event, we gain advocates in the city hosts - these hosts also attend nationally-focused conferences and talk positively about USQ and our events with people from around the country. It might not be apparent to our player community, but we have an exceptionally good reputation in the CVB and sports tourism industry, a credit to Events Director Sarah Woolsey and our herculean and professional event volunteers and staff.
And remember, we’ve only had three seasons of city-hosted events. For cities who plan their event lineups and budgets 2-3 years out, for some of them that’s no time at all. The issue of regional diversity in bidding will take time to resolve, but each year of successful events increases the diversity of bids the next.
Why is event bidding important?
US Quidditch is a five-year-old organization with a small staff, small budget, and mighty volunteer force. One of our strategic priorities is, and has been, to grow the sport of quidditch. Our sport is only ten years old, and while we’ve experienced explosive growth over that time, we have a long way to go to ensure that people are still playing competitive quidditch 20, 50, and 100 years from now. As the sport’s national governing body, and the only organization in the US with the resources to focus on the longevity of our sport overall, it’s always been critical to us that we set up the sport for long-term success. That was the primary driver behind moving World Cup from Middlebury, VT to New York City in 2010. It’s why Alex spearheaded the 2012 Summer Games project. It’s why we started QuidCon - to train team leaders in the hope that as the first round of quidditch-playing college seniors graduated, their teams would remain strong. It’s also why we opened our events to bidding.
I’ve talked about what Joe Pickett at OAN does for us already, but I really can’t overstate the contribution they have made to our sport. Joe believes in the potential of quidditch and is more than a contractor: he’s a partner. For a fraction of what his other clients pay, we get Joe as an advocate and ambassador who works tirelessly to develop relationships and bring quidditch to new cities. OAN reached out to us in 2011 and guided us through the process of creating a bid manual with the appropriate incentives and requirements, and started building the relationships that brought World Cup VI to Kissimmee, FL. Joe has spent most of his career in the sports tourism industry, and having him represent USQ gives cities the confidence to work with us, and allows us to remain focused on putting on events and managing our league.
When working with Kissimmee, we learned how wonderful it is to work with a CVB that puts on events professionally all the time. The event’s budget was easily half what we spent the previous year in New York City, when we put on an event ourselves without in-kind support or bid fees. Of course, New York City is a much more expensive place in general. It still holds, though - regionals with city support cost an average of $3-5,000 less than those without city support. City support allows us to keep regionals registration free, and it keeps membership fees low. Since instituting our individual membership program in 2013-2014, fees haven’t increased.
Cost isn’t the only factor. Working with cities gives us access to all of the city’s marketing channels from city listservs and calendars, to billboards and banners hung up across main street, and to flyers in local businesses and schools. For quidditch to succeed long-term as a sport, we need to build up local bases of support, and city residents are a great place to start. The people supporting our events and attending regionals and nationals are the parents who contact their parks and rec departments about starting youth programs; they’re the high school students who want to start a team; the college freshmen who join or start a team; they’re the adults who donate to USQ or want to volunteer for the next event. And the CVB employees themselves become advocates, as I mentioned - and also effectively double or triple USQ’s staff size. Running nine events each year becomes feasible because we have the support of so many professionals.
What happens after a city submits their bid?
Even before the bid deadline, we keep a spreadsheet updated with all the cities that have expressed interest in bidding to Joe, and track their progress. Each year, some cities decide not to bid for the current year but do bid for the following year. Other cities need an extension on the bid deadline. Once we have all the submitted bids, USQ’s employees and regional coordinators talk through the pros and cons of each bid, and decide on finalists for each regional and nationals. At this early stage, our criteria include:
Does the bid meet the minimum requirements listed in the bid manual? Usually, not all of them do.
Is the location feasible for our teams? In the past we’ve declined to advance bids from states like New Mexico and Tennessee because they were too far from the regional concentration of teams, despite being great bids.
Has this site been a previous event location? Are there other good bid options, so we can move the event around?
Is this a location that our players would really enjoy? Sometimes even if a bid doesn’t meet all our requirements, we advance it to the finalist stage in the hopes that we can negotiate a bid that will work with the host city.
After we select finalists, USQ staff conducts site visits. This is always quite a process! I accompanied Sarah on most site visits for the 2014-2015 season, and for the upcoming season Sarah, Events Manager Mary Kimball, and Membership Director Katie Stack shared the traveling. We select up to two finalists for each regional and up to three for nationals, and within a one or one and a half month period that’s a lot of traveling.
We focus on a lot of things during site visits:
What kind of support will we get from the CVB/facility? This support could include things like free field space, field lining, bathrooms, trash pickup, medical staff support, chairs, tables, bleachers, and also how many staff members will be working on the event.
Are the facilities laid out well for a quidditch tournament? Do they have enough bathrooms? Is the facility close to food and hotels?
What dates is the facility available? Does that make sense for our teams? Is there the potential for inclement weather?
Is there the potential for a strong local base of spectator support?
After site visits, we know when each facility is available and we ensure that event dates make sense for the lineup as a whole. We also have a good idea of what the costs will look like for USQ to host each event, and we estimate the costs for our teams to attend. We pick a dozen major cities and check airline prices and driving distances. Travel costs are only part of potential event costs to teams, though: an 80- or 60-team tournament is expensive to run, and city support and ticket sales covered two-thirds of World Cup 8 expenses. We need city support in order to keep team fees for nationals relatively low at $400 per team.
We continue to have an open dialogue with cities we don’t choose, and let them know what would make their bid stronger in the future.
Where we’re headed
In the future, we would like to move toward accepting bids further out than two years, as well as start looking at multi-year partnerships. Many cities would like to host an event for multiple years in a row, as a way to protect and build on their investment.  Similarly, we’re interested in exploring the possibility of having nationals rotate predictably among three or four locations around the country. This is a familiar model among other large amateur sports tournaments, and would allow the best of both worlds: building strong local spectator bases and solid relationships with cities, as well as spreading the costs around more for our teams.
Over the coming months we’re going to use this tumblr for more posts like this one - giving more behind the scenes information and context on all of the day-to-day workings behind running a nonprofit sports league. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you, and we’ll make sure it’s a tradition that continues with our new Executive Director.
