Some worked examples with respect to the PMP. (These are designed to show how the PMP would work on the local (Kingdom/Barony/Shire) level. One example, T.I., is given at the Corporate level.) (modified 6 December, 2002)

Local event costing (not necessarily  totally realistic -- think of this as a thought experiment.) (Expenses for any feast would be added to these costs, but I presume that they would be compensated by proper costing and pre-booking to ensure that costs were on target.) I am assuming a camping event (hence the privies). The last column assumes that the cost of the event is held constant rather than increased. The examples assume that all attendees are adults or children over 12 paying full price because otherwise it would be difficult to show the calculations.

Item	Cost now	PMP Cost	Same fee scenario
Publicity (Flyers and newsletter)	$50	$50	$50
Privies (Assuming an attendance of 350 people. 1 privy/50 people/day @ $100/privy)	$700	$700	$700
Cost of Site	$1000	$1000	$1000
Site tokens (with receipts ($25) under PMP plan)	$50	$75	$75
Other (TP, site handouts, etc.)	$100	$100	$100
Franchise Fee (assuming 350 attendance)		$350	$350
Total Cost of Event.	$1900	$2275	$2275
Site fee (assuming 250 in the gate (conservative estimate to ensure profitability) rounded to the nearest dollar). One always should budget on minimum expected attendance. (Last column assumes choice of no change of site fee.)	$8	$9	$8
Break-even attendance. (How many people have to show up to break even on costs.) (Actually the numbers for the PMP cases are a little high due to the Franchise Fee adjustments, which were not taken into account in this calculation.)	238	253	284
Expected profit to local group if 400 people show up. (Extra people are good!) (Franchise Fee increased to $400)	$1300	$1275	$875
Expected profit to local group if 350 people show up.	$900	$875	$525
Expected profit to local group of 300 people show up (Franchise fee reduced to $300)	$500	$475	$175
Expected profit to local group if only 250 people show up (Franchise Fee reduced to $250)	$100	$75	($175)
Expected loss to local group if only 150 people show up (Franchise Fee reduced to $150) This is the "disastrous failure case".	($700)	($725)	($875)

As you can see the total net cost to the local group (assuming increase of site fee by $1) is at most $25, the cost of printing the receipts for attendance. Note that the group could (but need not) plan on paying the Franchise Fees either in whole or in part from the overall general fund, if they so desired. Note that even in the constant fee case that the event will do better than breaking even as long as more than 275 people show up. (This number includes the Franchise Fee adjustment.)

Estimate of effort/cost to handle Kingdom newsletters:
(The assumption here is 1000 subscriptions. Costs/effort should be proportional. Cost/effort savings due to web-based subscriptions have been ignored to produce a conservative estimate. Real numbers taken from the costs for The Page, normalized to 1000 subscribers. Note that The Page is relatively expensive compared to other newsletters.)

Newsletter costs:

Printing per quarter (3 issues)	$2500
Postage per quarter (3 issues)	$1150
Total price per quarter	$3650
Cost/subscriber per quarter	$3.65
Cost/subscriber per year (rounded up to nearest dollar)	$15

Estimate of volunteer time / paid clerk cost for handling subscriptions:
Two examples are given -- one assumes 3 min per subscription for data entry, which I feel is reasonable, and the other assumes that it will take 5 min per data entry because one commenter thought my 3 min. figure was unrealistic. My personal feeling is that it shouldn't take even three minutes to enter name, address and starting date for subscription (the rest would be calculated automatically).

Item	Example 1	Example 2
Number of subscriptions per week (1000/50)	20	20
Time per week to process subscriptions (est. 3 min./subscription (5 min.) including deposit slip and time to produce mailing labels once per month. Note that renewal of subscription should take much less than this.) This number could be dramatically reduced if web-based subscriptions were enacted, which shouldn't be a problem without the necessity of a signature for a waiver. In fact web-based subscriptions for T.I. are supposedly in the works even now.	60 min.	100 min.
Time to handle address corrections (assuming 2 of the thousand move each week!-- grossly over-estimated.) Again, this number would be reduced with a web-based change-of-address form.	6 min.	10 min.
Paid cost per week at $10/hr (a reasonable estimate for central handling, imho)	$11.00	$18.33
Cost per year (50 weeks per above calculation)	$550	$917
Additional cost per subscription (1000 subscriptions)	$0.55	$0.92
Total cost per subscriber (as above plus cost for central subscription handling, rounded up).	$16.00	$16.00

It is clear to me from this data that any Kingdom newsletter with a subscription base of a thousand subscribers or less could be easily handled by a single volunteer. Those extra-large Kingdoms with substantially more than 1000 subscribers would probably want to use the SCA Office as a subscription fulfillment service or hire their own clerk to do data entry. Note that the amount of time seems to be a lot less than is currently billed by the SCA Office. I have no idea why this is the case. It seems to me that one clerk could easily handle the Big Three (East, Middle, An Tir) in less than half a week.

Note that this example assumes that subscription levels for Kingdom Newsletters will remain at current levels. I see no reason why that would be the case with the increasing availability of web contact. Cost of newsletter would no longer be the cost of information, but the cost of the delivery system chosen. If web-presentation actually costs a significant amount, password access can be easily arranged in return for a relatively nominal cost. (Not all Kingdoms will necessarily have a volunteer to handle the costs of web-presence, even though most seem to have the same now.)

How much should T.I. Processing cost?

The same two examples as above are given.

Item	Example 1	Example 2
Number of  subscriptions (current level)	15,000	15,000
Renewals per week (Assuming 50 work weeks per year -- standard business practice)	300	300
Hours per week for data entry at 3 min. (5 min.) per entry.	15	25
Hours per week for address changes (at 2 changes /1000 subscribers /week)	1.5	2.5
Total hours per week	16.5	27.5
Cost per year at $10/hour	$8,250	$13,750
Cost per subscription	$0.55	$0.92