Should Tech Managers Still Be Staging Events?

Last week I wrote about our experiences at Bates College with internal installs.  It is clear to me that Tech Managers should be doing internal installs.  What about some of the other things that we have always done, should we still do them, does it still make sense?  The second biggest part of any Media Services division at a college, after classroom support, has always been Event Support.  In fact, in some departments, like ours at Bates, Event Support is part of the title of the department.  What does event support entail?  For, years at Bates it meant providing any and all A/V that any possible presentation on campus would need.  Need sound and video in the Field House for an advancement dinner, done.  Need to do an outside "drive-in movie", done.  Of course, by done, I mean done as well as we could do it.  Putting up sound and video in a field house for a 600 person dinner, is in fact, a time consuming task.  It took three employees a full day to setup, test and tear down the equipment.  It took two employees 4-5 hours to be at the event running the equipment.  Every piece of movable equipment we owned was being used at the event.  If any of that equipment had failed, we would not have been able to provide a spare.  The equipment we used was good quality, but not really right for the space.  This experience was repeated 5-6 times every year.  Usually, the response from attendees was that the event went well, but there were always a few valid complaints.  The projector was not bright enough, there were not enough speakers in the room, etc.

We took a look at what we were doing with event support and came to some conclusions:
1.  It takes a lot of man hours to properly pull off a staged event
2.  It takes good quality equipment and backups to that equipment to properly pull off a staged event
3.  Staging events is as much art as it is science, and people who only do it 5-10 times per year do not have enough practice.
4.  Buying the right equipment did not make financial sense.  How can we justify purchasing a $15,000 projector, that will only get used 5 times a year.  After getting used 15-20 times we would need to replace it because it would be obsolete.
5.  Internally supporting these events provided NO LONG TERM benefit to the college.  The only possible benefit is cost savings, but that is questionable, comes at the expense of a sub-par event.

Cost is questionable because you need to truly consider what it costs to put these events on in-house.  You need to not only count man hours to stage and run the event, but you need to consider what those man hours are NOT doing.  Who is supporting your classrooms when the entire staff is staging an event?  You also need to consider costs for equipment.  Projectors, screens, speakers and sound systems all need to be repaired and replaced over time.   This needs to be part of your calculations.

We now have a policy that states that all events that take place in a space with no built-in A/V will be outsourced.  The year that we implemented this policy we were able to cut $15,000 from the A/V budget.  This was money that we had budgeted for repair and replacement of event support equipment.  The result of this new policy, is that event planners know what to expect, what is possible and the events are staged and run by professionals who do this every day of their work lives.