This is everything we know about how to put on CascadiaJS or a conference like it. This information is not canonical and YMMV. But these practices have worked for us and we hope that by documenting them more people will take the leap and organize a conference for their community.
- Organizing Team
- Timeline
- Picking a Venue
- Picking a Date
- Format
- Dealing with Money
- Expenses
- Ticket Sales
- Sponsorships
- CFP
- Speakers
- Accomodations
- Staff
- Website
- Promotion
- Tools
This is the single most important thing that you will do. Here are some principles that we try to follow:
- Someone MUST be in charge. This person is the "curator" of the event. Everyone on the team shares responsibility, but the curator is ultimately accountable for everything that happens.
- The curator should expect to work 10+ hours/week leading up to the conference.
- Some keys roles to fill for the rest of the team:
- Website
- CFP/speakers
- Venue/logistics
- Tickets/promotion
- Sponsors
You want to begin planning for your conference at least 6 months out. Here is a sample timeline:
- T - 6 months: Pull together a core group of conference organizers.
- T - 5 months: Lock down venue and complete the sponsorship brochure.
- T - 4 months: Lock down top-tier sponsors.
- T - 3 months: Batch #1 tickets go on sale.
- T - 2 months: Batch #2 and #3 tickets go on sale.
- T - 1 month: Batch #4 (last chance) tickets go on sale.
- CONFERENCE
- T + 1 day: Thank you email to attendees and survey.
- T + 1 week: Personal thank you emails to speakers and sponsors.
- T + 2 weeks: Post-mortem with organizing team, photos, videos, etc.
Your budget will dictate what you can do here. Don't think that you need a fancy venue to have a successful conference. Ulimately your venue simply needs to provide the following things:
- Seating for your attendees.
- A/V for your speakers.
- Good (preferably great) Wi-Fi and bandwidth.
Researching Venues
- Pour through all types of sights--places that were used for art events, warehouses, studios, past tech events, conferences.
- Build a list containing details that are relevant to whittling this down.
- Build contacts and confirm that the capacity and requirements of the conf are met by an email/phone call.
- Go tour!
TEMPLATE TO TOUR:
Some things to look for:
- Broadband: what does their pipe look like?
- Wi-Fi: how many connected devices can it support?
- Plugs: what's the plug / power strip situation?
- Power: do we have to pay any surcharge for above average power usage?
- Is there any vendor lock-in regarding internet or WiFi?
- Seating: Can they comfortably accommodate 300 seated individuals with laptops?
- What's the line of sight like for the stage area? Any obstructions?
- Is the seating elevated/stadium?
- Are the chairs comfortable?
- A/V: What kind of projector(if provided)
- A/V: What kind of screen?
- Are there additional monitors/feeds in the event space or in breakout areas?
- What about sound / mics? Is there a system already provided on-site?
- Who will be running the A/V for us? Is there a vendor lock-in for A/V?
- Is there space to chill out?
- Is there space for workshops? For casual breakouts?
- Where will the sponsors set-up their booths?(if applicable)
- Can we choose our own food vendors?
- Is there a fee for going outside of preferred vendors?
- Can we provide alcohol to our attendees?
- Are we required to carry insurance for our event?
- Is parking provided? Where?
- Are we required to provide a security team?
- Cost: What is included in the cost?
- What's not included? (set-up, tear-down, A/V, etc)
- How much is the deposit? When is it due?
For managing lodging(destination conference):
- Is there any on-site event management offered? What does this include? What's the cost?
- What is the process for selling rooms? Is this managed by the lodging company or us?
- What are the hours for check-in and check-out? Can this budge at all for our event?
- How would we manage conference events mixing with others staying at the resort? Will there be friction with non-confers?
- Is WiFi provided in every room at no additional cost?
These questions may seem tedious, but each one of these can make for a very poor attendee experience and increase expenses for the conference dramatically.
Build a list of every conference that is similar to the one you're trying to organize. Make note of the "heavy hitters" like JSConf, JSConf EU, NodeConf, etc. Make sure you pick a date that conflicts as little as possible. Date conflicts will not only affect your ability to attract attendees but it will also may block potential speakers.
Here's a crowdsourced list of conferences from 2013/2014 that might be helpful.
First, how many attendees do you expect?
- 0-100 people: 1 track, 1 day conference.
- 101-300 people: 1 track, 2 day conference.
- 300-600 people: 2 track, 2 day conference.
- 600+ people: too many people.
Please see the How-to Conf Spreadsheet.
We choose to release tickets in 3-4 batches where the price of the ticket increases with each batch. This strategy has several nice benefits:
- Selling "early bird" tickets at a discount rewards your most passionate and enthusiastic community members.
- You give your team a more achievable goal (sell 30 tickets as opposed to 300).
- Affords multiple opportunities to promote your conference over time.
- You can be more agile and react to feedback on pricing (too expensive, too cheap, need a bigger venue, etc).
Build a target list of potential sponsors. Use other similar conferences as a guide for companies that might be interested in sponsoring your event. Have at least 50 companies in your target list.
Consider 3-4 tiers of sponsorship. Let's use an example to see how you might calculate these tiers:
Imagine that your conference budget is $100k. Sponsorships should account for roughly 50% of your budget, so that would be $50k in sponsorships. If you had 3 tiers of sponsorship, this would be a reasonable set of prices for each tier:
- Tier 1 - $8k (3 companies)
- Tier 2 - $4k (6 companies)
- Tier 3 - $1k (2 companies)
You might also consider a $0 "community" tier for companies that cannot afford a sponsorship but can contribute in other ways such as labor, services, promotion, etc.
Check out the CascadiaJS 2014 CFP process.
These are tools that we've used:
- Twitter - conference promotion.
- MailChimp - mailing lists.
- Google Analytics - website analytics.
- Github - create a new organization for your conference.
- ti.to - ticket sales.