drupalcon

Drupalcon pricing structure

Jacob Redding — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:17:28 +0000

Drupalcon North America has been announced and will be held in Washington D.C from August 4th to the 7th, 2009. Ticket prices have been announced as well as the ticketing scheme. Frequent Drupalcon goers probably noticed something new at Drupalcon Szeged, a tiered pricing scheme. In Szeged we started ticket prices out at 80 Euros and incrementally raised them to 250 Euros on the day of. In Szeged this was based on timeframe. Tickets purchased in June were priced at 80 Euro, a month later prices raised to 125 euros and so on until the day of the conference.

In D.C we did something similar but based this time it is based on actual ticket sales.

first 100 @ 125 USD
next 300 @ 175 USD
next 400 @ 200 USD
all others @ 250 USD

Why?
We introduced pricing schemes for Drupalcon Szeged as a direct result of Drupalcon Boston. In Drupalcon Boston we had expected 600 people to show up but just a month before the conference we barely had 400 paid registrants although 1,000s had registered online. This presented the Boston team with a real challenge as they were facing several hundred thousand dollars in costs. The Boston team had to make a lot of decisions, should they scale back? push people to buy tickets? do more marketing? What?

Scaling back is not an easy option when you are facing fixed costs such as the rent of a conference center, projectors, audio equipment, Internet, WiFi, etc. Without getting into the gory details of fixed vs variable costs (for the curious they are outlined here) lets just say that Drupalcon Boston was staring down a decent sized loss. Fortunately the Drupal community is awesome. In the last few weeks leading up to Drupalcon Boston ticket sales started to surge. Sales hit 600 tickets. Another 100 tickets were made available and those were quickly snatched up. The doors were shut but people still kept asking. Eventually the conference ended just over 900 people.

So what's the problem with this?

The Boston Drupalcon team was sweating bullets when sales has slumped and only a few hundred had confirmed their presence by purchasing a ticket. Several costs are variable, such as T-Shirts, lunch boxes, etc. but they require several weeks advanced notice. At Boston they were adding people by the tens just days before the event; which is simply not enough time to handle the extra load or keep the variable costs under control.

This is why the tiered pricing scheme was introduced at Drupalcon Szeged. The attempt was to get people to buy their tickets early which provides us with two items

Cash Flow
Accurate attendance numbers

Cash flow
Cash flow is an extremely important item to manage in a conference of this size. The conference venue is over $30k USD and they require cash up front. There are also expenses for Internet connectivity, catering, audio gear, etc. etc. all adding up to nearly $200k USD. Unfortunately these people don't wait until the conference starts to get paid, they want their money as soon as they can get it. The conference thus then relies on the money from tickets to help cover these costs to the best of its ability. The sooner we get the cash from ticket sales the sooner we can pay the suppliers and the less sweat and hair we loose.

Attendance numbers
Holding a conference for 400 people or a conference for 1,000 people changes a lot more than costs. The dynamic changes as well as the logistical challenges. In some respect the tiered pricing scheme worked very well for us in Szeged as it allowed the team to adjust the venue for the number of people. We originally expected 900 people in Hungary but ended up with just over 500. We saw a huge surge in ticket prices at the beginning and then a sharp taper off of sales. Although there was a bit more ticket sales towards the end the team was able to get a fairly firm grasp on the fact that we were not getting the 900 we expected and they adjusted items for 500 attendees.

Wrapping up
The entire purpose of the tiered pricing structure is to get cash in the door as soon as possible and to determine the audience size. If your considering attending Drupalcon please buy your ticket early. This way we can count your attendance and be prepared for your presence. Also this is not the only we way we are encouraging people to buy their tickets early. This year we started marketing earlier and also lined up a few presentations before the site launched. We also have a few other tricks up the sleeve.

Drupalcon Europe 2008

Jacob Redding — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:33:52 +0000

Due to the hard work of many people Drupalcon Boston was a great success but just like how the Drupal community doesn't stop once a new version is released neither does Drupalcon. Drupalcon Europe is announced and will be held in Szeged, Hungary. Gábor Hojtsy and Kristof Van Tomme provided a solid proposal and put together an awesome team of professionals whom combined will create yet another amazing Drupalcon!

This announcement marks the end of months of hard work by the Drupalcon Boston team, Drupalcon Europe team as well as several members of the Drupal community that stepped forward to provide proposals for Drupalcon's throughout Europe. Dates were checked and double checked, venues scrutinized, budgets drawn up and revised over and over again, and the tiniest of details thought out.

This announcement also marks the start of a lot of hard work on the part of the Drupalcon Europe team as well as many volunteers throughout the community. The team is always looking for volunteers so please if you have the time step forward to help make Drupalcon Europe another great success.

Even though we are announcing Drupalcon Europe 2008 we are now planning Drupalcon North America 2009, Drupalcon Europe 2009 as well as Drupalcon ??? Please submit your proposals and ideas now.

DrupalCon Group photo

Jacob Redding — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:38:25 +0000

The entire Drupalcon gang hanging out for a big group photo.

Cool shirt

Jacob Redding — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:31:23 +0000

I liked this shirt.. super geeky ;)

Come to Drupalcon

Jacob Redding — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:29:36 +0000

Closing ceremony at the Boston Drupalcon 2008.

DrupalCon Code sprint

Jacob Redding — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:43:44 +0000

The day after Boston DrupalCon 2008 a nice, and big, code sprint was held. People from all over the world came together to collaborate for a full day of working on modules, themes, and Drupal core. Its amazing to watch the community get together!

Emfield gets tudou.com support

Jacob Redding — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:56:44 +0000

While sitting and listening to the Drupal in China session at the Boston DrupalCon Aaron Winborn, creator of the emfield module, added support for the Chinese video sharing site tudou.com. Support was added in about 30 minutes demonstrating how easy it is to extend the functionality of the emfield and of Drupal.

DrupalCon Boston 2008

Jacob Redding — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:50:40 +0000

Drupalcon Boston 2008!

DrupalCon

Jacob Redding — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:27:31 +0000

Today is the first day of DrupalCon Boston 2008 and the start of an incredibly busy week for me. Working with the great folks at Rain City Studios as well as a great guy at World Zhulu I left my comfortable home in Beijing, China to be here for this whirlwind event. The many volunteers of the Boston DrupalCon team, Kieran, and many others have poured thousands of hours into making this a major milestone in the history of Drupal. Robert, of Raincity Studios, John, of World Zhulu, and myself will be leading one of the many sessions at this years North American DrupalCon!

Our session is entitled "Drupal in China the how, who, and why". We'll be discussion why Drupal in China is important, who is using Drupal is China as well as who are the dev shops in China, and finally we'll cover how China is adopting Drupal as well as OSS and, more specifically, how it is different that North America or Europe. I think this is an important session not simply because China is the next big juggernaut that is constantly in the news but because the adoption rate of OSS across Asia is incredibly low compared to the Western world.

We have a few goals with running this session. The first is to encourage more collaboration with Chinese developers by discussing the various challenges and barriers to collaboration. These include language barriers, cultural differences as well as differences in technology. The second goal is to discuss the challenges and rewards of working in China directly with Chinese developers. The third goal is to discuss/encourage various forms of investment in OSS within China. Although outsourcing is the obvious first thing that springs to mind when someone mentions investment in a developing country this will not be the center of our discussion. There are many other forms of investment that can do great things in this world.

If you are interested in how China, or Asia, is using Drupal and/or want to get involved in helping to grow Drupal in Asia stop by our session and join the discussion.
Monday March 3rd, 2008 @ 3:30pm,
DrupalCon Boston 2008