If you've ever wondered how much it costs to put on a CiviCon and the associated trainings and sprint - how much money we take and how we spend it - then this blog post if for you.
Conference
Ticket sales: $11,307
Sponsorship: $31,500
Total income: $42,807
Venue and equipment hire: $10,520
Food and drinks: $10,058
Filming crew and post-production: $8,800
T-shirts: $1,890
After-party: $1,097
Venue search: $868
Signage: $633
Name badge: $60
Total expenditure: $33,926
Balance: $8,881
Training
Training fees: $20,000
Venue hire: $2,590
Food: $3,352
Trainer expenses: $2,150
Total expenses: $8092
Balance: $11,908
Sprint
Sprint fees: $10,850
Venue hire: $6,935
Breakfast and lunch: $1,800
Transport: $2,940
Total expenses: $11,675
Balance: -$825
Other
Core team travel: $4,706
Core team accommodation: $1,375
Partner meeting venue: $420
Overall balance: $13,463
So we made a profit of $13,463, which is great - we'll be investing it back into improving future conferences.
A few things to note:
- Our conferences would simply not be possible without the help of our sponsors. In Denver 75% of our conference income came from them so a big thank you to all the organisations that dug into their pockets to help out.
- Feeding attendees at a conference is expensive. Our balance would have been $15,000 more healthy if we didn't cater the event.
- We are going to invest a significant proportion of the profit into a paid conference organiser role to help take CiviCon 2016 to the next level.
- The numbers only tell part of the story - we couldn't have put CiviCon on without the help of an amazing volunteer organising team, which we plan to keep alongside our paid co-ordination role in 2016.
It would be great to hear your feedback, thoughts and analysis on the above numbers.
Stay tuned for more info on CiviCon North America 2016, and in the mean time don't forget you can watch all the videos from 2015 here, including this highlight reel that we'll use to promote future conferences.
See you at CiviCon London and the DC user summit!
Comments
Michael, thanks for your help in organizing CiviCon Denver 2015. You were great at coordinating all the different volunteer committees, and helping to keep us all on track. As a lead on both the sponsorship committee and the user and admin training, I can say we couldn't have done it without you.
I hope some consideration is given to having you be the paid event coordinator next year.
Cheers,
Joe