[nittanygirl]

As far as the concert goes, I planned one as a philanthropy event once for a service group and you definitely will need some money even to just get the word out there.

Options include hosting a dry concert at a fraternity (getting their permission and their available dates might be difficult, and they may want to split proceeds), having an over 21 night only at a club to raise money, and to find a club that will host a split event. Basically there need to be levels and one level be the "dry level" and one be the over 21 level. At our event we posted bouncers at the front door and at all access points to the over-21 level from the dry level. THIS IS NECESSARY. You don't want to have a risk management issue on hand immediately. Lucky for us, our club was willing to donate the night to us (a Wednesday, no club is going to give over a big night) and as long as we made over 150 covers, we didn't have to pay them. If not, we had to start paying the bouncers (that's where you're taking a huge risk, because if you don't have money in the first place, if the event tanks you still have to pay the bouncers).

Second, sound guys cost a lot of money! The one year my cochair ran the event, her sound guy was $500. That was like 85% of the budget for the event. Our year, we got lucky and one of the bands let us use their equipment. If not, we'd never have made as much.
We also did canning events downtown throughout the semester. This involves getting permission from your local municipal building. It took COUNTLESS hours of work to just set up this concert AND capital to get it going that came from dues. While the dues for this ran about $150 a semester, and were enough to keep everything going and some cushion space, the money was carefully budgeted and a necessity just to host events.