
Ask HN: Anyone organized a conference? - chatmasta
Has anyone here organized a conference? I understand it&#x27;s quite a big undertaking, but I would be curious to hear about small teams or solo organizers who successfully organized one. Even more interesting might be to hear about failure to organize one.<p>Is it possible to accomplish without significant funding in advance? What kind of profit can you expect to make?
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hluska
I've organized both technology and social justice conventions. To answer your
questions:

1.) Is it possible to accomplish without significant funding in advance?

Yes, but it's one hell of a lot of extra legwork. When I was in University, I
pulled one off without any money at all. It worked, but everything took at
least twice the time it would have taken with funding in advance. I struggled
with a venue up until the very end and simply cannot describe the stress of
losing a venue ten days before an event. It's only 9am where I'm from, but
just thinking about this makes me want to break out the hard alcohol...

2.) Profit?

I don't want to seem overly negative, but you may occasionally show a profit,
particularly if you're lucky enough to score some good (ie - cash paying)
donours/sponsors. However, when you throw an event the expected result is for
things to get fucked up in unpredictable ways. And, under the law of throwing
big events, the chances are good that the one thing you relied upon the most
and considered the most foolproof will end up getting the most fucked up.

Therefore, you may see a profit (and if you do, for the love of all that is
holy, share with your army of volunteers). But, the expected profit should
always be zero or even a loss.

Here's a tip from the trenches. Make sure that you can personally afford to
pay for the venue after the event, even if you don't make a single penny of
revenue. Venue managers seem to be a fairly tight knit group and if you get a
reputation for screwing one, you'll never book another...

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dirktheman
Sure do, the company I work for organizes business seminars. We're a small
team (6 persons) organizing 15-20 conferences a year. We have two programme
managers, two marketers, one person on customer support and one
administrator/office support.

The cost breakdown is roughly: 25% speakers 25% location, F&B, tech 25%
marketing 25% margin

Starting without funding in advance is damn near impossible. All parties will
require an advance, you'll make costs without even having one single paying
customer.

Starting an event from scratch is really hard, people won't be familiar with
it. There's an old adagio: first time you loose money, second time you break
even, third time you'll make profit or you won't exist anymore...

If you have an awesome idea I think the best way for you to go is to partner
up with a corporate sponsor who will take care of the costs/risk. However, if
you don't have any experience and a network in the field I doubt you'll be
able to convince anyone...

Good luck!

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matt_the_bass
Is there a trade journal in your domain that you can team up with? Most of the
conferences and trade shows in my line of work are owned and run by magazines.

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mpb
I have (More on the Financial Auditing and Web Development side), albeit one
not generally related to Technology (Anime Convention)

It's possible to accomplish without significant funding in advance, but you'll
either need to have connections or need to think smart. If there's a local
University nearby you might be able to get a student organization to book you
some rooms for free if your conference aligns with some interests. Some
community centers might give you a similar deal. That takes care of the
venue[0].

A nearby public park system may also have Shelters or small buildings to rent
on the cheap (<$500) but you're less likely to have amenities like Wi-Fi power
outlets, and Air Conditioning. It may also not have nearby restaurants if it's
out in the sticks. If your guests all have cars and smart phones that's fine
and dandy, but some demographics don't. Consider who you're targeting when
picking a venue.

If you're doing this without advance funding, you had better have a very small
event where you can do everything yourself, or volunteers. If you aren't
paying volunteers you had better have some good non-monetary incentives for
them [1].

I wouldn't organize this kind of thing from scratch for the profit.
Conventions can be profitable, but unless you really hit it out of the park
it's not something you can reliably live off of. For perspective the
convention I helped organize sees >3000 paid guests annually and gets over 130
paid vendors. Not particularly large, but not really small either[2].

I can tell you now that even with freebies from the university and sponsors we
couldn't pay one organizer a livable wage, let alone a team. Part of that is
because we don't really milk our guests and we've reached a market cap for are
area, but even if we doubled our prices I still don't think we could pay one
livable salary reliably.

[0] Depending on the university, you may not be able to charge an entrance fee
for rooms obtained in this way.

[1] I suspect this only works for the convention I helped organize because not
even the lead organizer gets a dime of payment. Volunteers arguably get better
rewards then the "staff" do, because once they've worked a few hours, they get
free admission whereas the "staff" are just always working during the event.

[2] Big enough to worry about the fire code and get local newspaper and TV
coverage, but not big enough to be considered Wikipedia notable. (Ironically
shortly after a Wikipedian accused us of being in bed with local media
outlets, our Marketing Director was made a admin of a local newspaper's
website. A broken clock is right twice a day.)

