As you can see in our finance plan about half of our revenues comes from ticket sales.
Ticket sales are important because of two reasons. On the one hand you get money for the conference and on the other hand you can regulate and check the number of attendees which you need for catering and location.
We decided against free tickets for everyone. Having even just a small, symbolic price helps in reducing the no-show rate and avoids ticket-hoarding.
If you don't know how large your audience will be start small. You can grow larger any time. But keep your finances in mind.
We sell the tickets in three steps. About a fifth of the tickets we sell as Early Bird tickets. The rest we sell in batches of 50 - 100 tickets on Sundays. Why on Sundays? Because we are a community conference and want to avoid that big companies buy all of our tickets when others are at work.
We had added some Late Bird tickets as well. But in the last year we just offered Diversity support tickets instead.
We have several types of tickets.
We offer an Early Bird ticket which is sold some months before the conference to get a first feeling if this event will get a lot of attention and how quickly the tickets sell.
The next ticket type is the Regular ticket. This is the main type.
The last tickets to be sold are the Late Bird tickets. They are a little bit more expensive than the rest.
In the last year we sold Diversity Support Tickets from the beginning and no Late Bird tickets anymore. These tickets have the only purpose to increase our diversity efforts. We use each sale of these tickets to send more diversity applicants to our conference. These tickets are sold in three varieties: with additional 25%, 50% and 100%. So each buyer can decide for themselves what they can afford and if they want support our diversity stipends. Next to the ticket option there is also a donation option for the diversity stipends.
As a "payment" for our sponsors they get tickets for the conference depending on their sponsoring level. This contingent is on the one hand a number of free tickets and on the other hand a number of options to buy more tickets in case that the conference is sold out.
The sponsors give these tickets away to their employees or to the community as a gift.
We like to promote the event in the community. We work very closely with some meet-ups in the area and give vouchers away that their members can get the tickets cheaper. Another idea we had the year before is to hide a voucher in the source code of our website.
The number of vouchers should be limited.