If you’ve been watching our social networks at all, you’ve seen that we’ve been putting on a big push for ticket sales. We’re even running a “holiday special” through today (as I write this) that can save up to 30% off of 3 tickets or more.
I got a message from a friend who’s never organized a conference before with the following question…
Y’all have a super solid list of speakers and sponsors, I can’t imagine you not selling out, why the big push and discounts?
TL;DR - We have a lot of deadlines and costs that are upon us from a planning perspective. Selling out earlier, even at a reduced cost, allows us to do more for the event.
How we came up with pricing
DeliveryConf is a not for profit conference run entirely by volunteers. This means not only is it not a goal to make a profit, we have to avoid it or the tax person would get very unhappy with us.
The good news is, this makes figuring out ticket and sponsorship prices fairly straightforward. You estimate your costs and divide it by your capacity. Boom. Done. For profit conferences (like any business) simply choose the highest price they believe the market will bear.
The bad news is, there’s no room for error when you’re not just charging as much as you can. Since we don’t want to make a profit or lose money (which would likely come out of our pockets) we need to be sure that we sell exactly the number of tickets and exactly the number of sponsorships that we planned for.
But back to my friend’s question… if we’re confident we’ll meet those goals, why the push?
Most of the expenses for running a conference have to be paid in advance.
We have to pay our entire food and beverage bill, plus a 25% service fee, plus sales tax, plus a 20% contingency fee (in case y’all drink more coffee than we estimated) in early January. If we sell all of the tickets in the last couple weeks, we simply can’t do that.
We’d love to be able to afford to get a bit of conference swag. Something useful that people can use after the conference. That needs to be ordered and paid for a few weeks in advance.
There are several other examples of stuff we’d like to do.
We chose January because there’s not a lot of conferences so there would be less competition. As a first year conference, we didn’t want to go head to head with more established events. Not to mention, many of us work at those events for our actual jobs.
In retrospect, we now see why there aren’t a lot of conferences in January. It’s a terrible time to sell tickets.
We’d much rather give you the discount today than get full price in mid January.
So, if you’re planning on coming to DeliveryConf to see our amazing speakers and participate in some great discussions, please don’t wait to register. As I’m writing this the link to the holiday special is stil live on our home page.