Conference organiser’s handbook
The next step is creating a budget. In order to make a budget you must know what venue, catering, and speakers will cost. Then you must decide on a ticket price and a ticket sales system. Also, you must give some thought to marketing.
As soon as you’ve taken your core decisions you must start working on the budget. The most important budget items are venue, catering, A/V equipment, and the speakers’ travel and hotel. The next page contains detailed instructions for everything but the speakers, who are treated on their own page.
Add 10% for minor items and unforeseen and you have a first estimate of the total cost of running the conference. Be sure to calculate catering and goodie bags on a per-head basis: if 20 tickets remain unsold, 20 lunches per day remain unbought.
Creating the budget is a bit of work, especially if it’s you first time, but updating it is fairly easy: you just enter revised cost estimates and income from ticket sales. To make it easier for you, here’s a sample budget sheet (Excel).
All in all the budget is a fairly static document, and its editing is only punctuated by a deep sigh of relief once enough tickets have been sold and the negative result is turned into a positive one.
After calculating expenses it’s time to think about incoming money. If you have a sponsorship package, assume a modest number of sponsors and put their money on the In side. Your other source of income is ticket sales, so that’s what we have to discuss next.
The natural instinct of first-time organisers is to make the ticket price as low as possible so as to attract even potential visitors who don’t have much money to spend. Although this is the correct basic approach for your first conference, you shouldn’t take it too far. You just won’t be able to organise anything below €150 per ticket.
Don’t assume that you will sell all tickets. Spending unexpected profits on free beers for all is a hell of a lot easier (not to mention more fun) than covering a budget deficit.
Take the budget you created, and price the tickets so that you break even when about 70% of the venue capacity is taken. Remember that there will be early-bird tickets at a lower price, and that about 10-20% of your visitors will have a free ticket. We will get back to these in a minute.
Subtract 4.5% from the ticket price for handling — especially if you expect many attendees to pay by credit card. That goes to the financial institutions; the other 95.5% ends up with you.
I’m not going to give you more advice on this one. There might be special factors in your country that I don’t know about. Keep prices low, but allow yourself some breathing space.
It is customary to offer discounted early bird tickets. The main purpose of the early bird is marketing: the end of the early-bird period is your most important marketing moment after the conference announcement.
In general the early-bird price should be about €50 to 100 lower than the standard price. Set a maximum on the number of early bird tickets. It’s all great fun to have a big rush just before early bird ends, but if you’ve suddenly sold 75% of your tickets for early-bird prices you will likely have a gaping hole in your budget.
What we usually do is set both a maximum number of tickets and a final date. Early bird ends when all tickets are sold or the cut-off date comes around; whatever happens first.
We’ll get back to the end-of-early-bird marketing moment later.
Sponsors sometimes ask for free and discounted tickets. It’s customary to offer two free tickets per sponsor. Their representatives should be able to visit the conference, after all. Foreign companies will often send only one delegate, so they are the cheapest sponsors you can have.
If local web companies sponsor you they’ll ask for a special discount on further tickets. They will want to send their web developers to your conference, and expect some sort of return on their initial investment.
Add sponsor money and discounted ticket prices, divide it by the number of free plus discounted tickets, and you get the price per ticket your sponsor pays. This price should be higher than your regular ticket price. The sponsor’s logo is shown throughout the conference, and that is worth some extra money.
If sponsors try to beat you down, explain the mechanism to them. Usually they’ll understand once they see the figures.
The following people rate free tickets:
This does not count venue, A/V, and catering people, who generally work for the venue or a subcontractor, but you don’t have to worry about them.
You may have made a deal with some bloggers for exposure in exchange for free tickets. Add them to the list of free-ticket holders.
Remember that a free ticket costs you money, so don’t give out too many. Every free ticket holder will eat one lunch per day, receive a goodie bag, drinks a few beers on your tab, and takes up a seat that a paying attendee could have occupied. In general free ticket holders should make up between 10 and 20% of your attendees.
In the last three weeks before the conference people will creep out of the woodwork who feel they’re entitled to a free ticket. You should ignore them — rudely, if necessary. These people deserve nothing.
You must add your local VAT rate to your ticket price; you pay that money to the government through the normal procedures in your country. The question is how you present this VAT to your customers.
Krijn and I decided to publish the ticket prices without VAT, and add a note to the table that 21% Dutch VAT applies. After all, our customers are freelancers or companies who are used to working with VAT-exclusive prices. There’s nothing wrong with publishing VAT-inclusive prices, though — it’s just a decision you have to make.
Make sure the invoices generated by your ticket sales system clearly show the VAT paid, as well as your (and possibly your attendee’s) VAT number. This is usually required by tax law — certainly in Europe.
Foreign attendees may also have pay VAT, and generally cannot automatically deduct this VAT from their balance in their home country. They can ask for reimbursment, but the rules are abstruse and highly localised. Intracommunautary VAT exchanges are a mess and badly need European harmonisation. This is not your problem, though: you are a conference organiser, not a tax consultant.
If the ticket system allows and your tax consultant agrees, do not charge foreigners VAT. But don’t spend too much time on this — anything VAT-related gets complicated in a hurry and it’s better to spend your energy on some more marketing.
Despite generating quite a few tweets and blog posts, your initial announcement of the conference will generate only modest ticket sales. Potential attendees sit up and take notice, study the speaker list, and decide they might like to go. They won’t buy a ticket immediately, though. They have employers or spouses to convince, or calculate they can afford to go to the conference if they get that one job they’re currently pitching for.
The first big sales peak comes with the end of early bird. Those who have already decided to go will be spurred to action in order to save €100 (or whatever), and you’ll suddenly sell a lot of tickets. This is the point of offering early-bird tickets.
After the end of early bird ticket sales will drop sharply, but will settle in a plateau with roughly the same amount of sales every week. In the last two weeks before the conference ticket sale will once again spike. Potential attendees know that this is really their last chance, and will make the purchase. If you’re lucky you’ll sell out during this last spike.
Trust that last spike. It can be very unnerving to see a steady but very modest ticket sales about a month before the conference, especially when you’re still running a deficit. The last spike will help you through, though, as long as you keep steady nerves.
About 2% of your ticket holders will never show up. The exact amount depends on the ticket price: people will turn up more often for an expensive conference than for a cheap one. Free conferences commonly have a 50% no-show rate, but that number drops sharply as soon as you charge even €5 for tickets.
(Incidentally, that’s why I advise organisers of free events to charge a little bit, say €5 or 10. All of a sudden your attendee list becomes much more reliable, and you can expect most subscribers to actually turn up.)
You can afford to sell about 2-3% more tickets than the formal auditorium capacity. I did so once, and it worked. Still, it’s a gamble: what if all visitors show up after all?
Although the main bills will come your way only after the event, you will have to pay deposits and advances to various parties, as well as all the flights, before the event. You need cash on hand in order to do so.
The first step is to ask all your major vendors (venue, catering, A/V, and hotel) if they require a deposit. That allows you to calculate the money you need before the conference.
One source of quick money is sponsorships. We already discussed those. The other source is ticket sales.
Your main problem problem is that ticket sales systems pay you only after the event has ended. The reason is that sometimes “clever” people set up a fake event, sell tickets for it, and then disappear with the money. In that case, the recipient of the money is responsible for returning it to the defrauded attendees, and that recipient is the sales system; not you. Thus, if they’d give you your money straight away, sales systems would leave themselved vulnerable to having to pay back the money to the buyers, too, after having given it to you. Predictably, they don’t like losing money, so they will retain your money until after the event’s stated date.
So you need some cash from another source. Our most important source is invoice payments. Our ticket system allows our attendees to opt for an invoice that they pay directly to our bank account. This money bypasses the sales system entirely and is thus immediately available.
The downside is that you have to check whether all invoices have been paid, remind laggard payers, and so on. Usually the system will help you by generating warnings, but part of the administrative chores rest with you. That’s the price you have to pay for having some cash flow before the event.
The administrative work consists of finding and signing up for a ticket sales system, setting up an attendee database, and maintaining customer relations.
The ticket sales system is the biggest problem, because finding one may take some time, setting it up requires all kinds of boring but necessary administrative steps, and you need to make sure that it’s properly localised. The system must be able to generate invoices in the local language as well as in English, after all. Ask during negotiations.
Customer relations can take quite a bit of time if there are many people who don’t read important organisational mails, want to transfer their tickets to someone else, have an improperly rendered character in their name that doesn’t occur in your language, or suddenly discover urgent reasons they should be offered a discount. Obviously, most of this traffic will take place in the last two weeks leading up to the conference.
The database is simpler. Once set up it must receive information from the sales system (preferably automated, but sometimes you’ll need to do it by hand). On command it must deliver an all-attendee mailing list as well as the master badge list that will be sent to the printer shortly before the conference.
Our attendee database contains name, country, billing address, email address, organisation, Twitter handle, and ticket type. The types we use are Speaker, Attendee, Organiser, and Sponsor. Sometimes we give their badges different designs, so we need to know which attendee is what.
You’ll likely have a good idea how to go about marketing. Just do what comes naturally and approach people you think may want to help you. Below are some guidelines.
There are four main marketing moments. Make sure you have blogposts, mailings, and tweets lined up for each of them:
Decide in advance what you want to announce for each of the four. Obviously, date and city are part of the first one, but other than that it’s your call. A first-time conference must announce a few well-known speakers initially, since it must be validated in the eyes of potential attendees.
You have more leeway with the other three, although in general it’s wise to make sure you have something to announce. The next batch of speakers is an obvious choice, but it could also be the number of early-bird tickets left, the session descriptions, the schedule, parties, or whatnot. Just do what comes naturally to you, but make sure each of these four announcements has a little more content than just “Buy a ticket.”
The end of early bird sales is the most important of the four. “See these great speakers and save €50” remains the most efficient conference marketing statement, and people will react in droves.
Make sure to call attention to the end of early bird in time: you want people to buy tickets, after all. Aim for having about 20 tickets or five days left after the announcement.
In general the last early-bird tickets will be picked up quickly, but once they’re gone people will hesitate again and not buy full-priced tickets. That’s a pity, but there’s nothing you can do about it.
One trick that can help here is initially giving out fewer early-bird tickets than you intend. For instance, you could initially make only 50 early bird tickets available, but once 45 of them have been sold you can announce that the great interest in your conference made you decide to release 25 more early-bird tickets. Of course your budget assumed 75 early-bird tickets from the start.
Next to end of early bird, the most powerful marketing tools you have is speaker announcements. Every time you announce a bunch of them, people will sit up and take notice. “Hey, is my hero speaking there? I must go!”
In practice it’s likely you’ll announce part of your line-up at several moments. You need a few speakers for the initial announcement, but at that point in time you likely won’t have all your speakers yet. Therefore another batch of speakers should be announced later.
There are two drawbacks to spread-out speaker announcements. First of all, speakers will ignore your carefully-crafted schedule and put your conference on their public list when they feel like it. This doesn’t matter as much as you would think: few people read those lists. Relatedly, some speakers may not read your important organisational emails and be offended that they’re not mentioned on the Speakers page. An email usually settles the issue, but it’s still annoying.
The more serious danger is that employees of medium-to-large companies will not be able to pitch your conference to their bosses, who have to sign their budget requests. Generally bosses want to see a full list of speakers before they commit their training budget to your conference. This is a totally silly rule — bosses generally cannot distinguish good speakers from bad ones — but it works like that in companies. Go figure.
Despite these drawbacks, spread-out speaker announcements are pretty much unavoidable since it’s likely you’ll fill in the last two or three slots just one or two months before the conference. Just do what comes naturally, and it will all go fine.
You’ll likely have a personal blog. Put it out there; some people will see the message. Ask your friends to do the same. Submit it to whatever sites you know that run general web news. Put it on Lanyrd.
These actions help. People that are enthusiastic about your conference will tell their friends, spread the word, and thus you can reach a surprising amount of people.
Also, it might make sense to give out a few free tickets to well-known bloggers or site owners in return for some exposure. Don’t give out too many; I’d say about one each for two to three bloggers at most. Or you can give them an extra one to give away with some sort of contest.
By themselves, blogposts will not reach enough potential attendees. Still, you need them because people will distrust a conference that does not talk about itself.
We create a mailing list (with Mailchimp, but any vendor will do) for each conference series. So we have separate lists for Mobilism and CSS Day, the conferences we repeat regularly.
Put a Subscribe form on your conference page from day 1. That gives people a very easy way of keeping abreast with your preparations and announcements.
Send out a mail at each marketing moment. The text is essentially the same as for the blogpost.
You need some sort of social media strategy. I work with Twitter naturally but am not on Facebook, so I use Twitter a lot and ignore the rest. Your situation might be the opposite. It doesn’t really matter which tool you choose, as long as you know how to use it best and at least some of your target audience also uses it.
Always ask your speakers to blog about your conference. Not all will do it, but the posts of those who do will generate some traffic.
Don’t hesitate to call out for help to your speakers if sales are still bad about three weeks before the conference. By then the speakers have been announced and thus have a stake in the conference. Not all will help you, but some will.
Sponsors can be a good marketing aid, too, especially when they have a large and loyal following among your target audience. Sponsors are naturally inclined to help you a bit with your marketing outreach: since they put money on the table anyway they’d prefer the conference to succeed. Ask your sponsors what they can do to help you. They’re usually willing to spread a news item once through their own channels.
You can’t create a budget and ticket price without having some idea how expensive the locations are going to be, so that’s our next topic.