At 10:46 AM 7/16/2001 -0600, you wrote:
>Matt Sergeant writes:
> > I doubt it's the last one we'll see fall... I suspect TPC will be a
> > shadow of its former self... :(
>
>for four years arguing that it should be cheaper. If you feel that
>there'd be more attendees at a lower price, then I suggest you tell
>that to every O'Reilly conferences person you see at TPC (except for
>me :-)
>
>Are there any requests other than price for next year? What would you
>like to see? What could you do without?
I'd like to know more about suggestions to make these suggestions? Is it
really as simple as me going to another O'Reilly person or filling out an
apres-conference survey form and saying "More attendees for less money". Or
is there anything more concrete that would help it more?
I am just afraid that simply stating this, I would not be taken seriously
because it seems so obvious. But how do you get more attendees? Will they
definitely come if it is less money? And if so, how much less? I am not a
marketing person, so I am really bad at figuring out how to map this
concretely, but I am not sure that there is an obvious price point where
someone would attend or not attend.
For example, let's say the conference costs $1000 and 1000 attendees
attend? At that point it is $1,000,000 to hold the conference. And let's
just say that's what you need to pull it off. But if you lower the cost by
10% to $900, then you've lost $100,000. So you need at least another 120 or
so attendees to make up the cost.
But will you get more attendees?
Although you lowered the price by 10%, the hotel and the plane remain a
fixed cost. Let's say it is $1000 for the hotel and $500 for the plane?
Then a 10% drop a $1000 conference fee becomes less than a 5% drop in the
overall cost and no more attendees may actually come.
Anyway, here are some suggestions I would personally have to make it easier
to attend conferences like this. Although perhaps they have already been
thought about in the past and discarded for good reasons by people who know
more about conference organization than I do... :)
Note that some ideas are more radical than others and reflect that I am
just shooting some ideas out.
1) More Student Discount (If none already)
I don't know if this is currently the case, but I think people who are true
full-time students should be allowed to attend at a significantly reduced
cost. Part of open source and Perl advocacy is getting the young generation
hyped so that they will want to continue to carry the torch.
My gut feeling is that full-time students don't tend to attend these
expensive conferences anyway because it's their parent's that they would
have to convince. So offering them a low enough ticket cost to basically
cover expenses will still contribute to the bottom line yet get a new round
of attendees.
And next year they may be out of school with a full time job that would be
willing to pay for them. So it primes a set of attendees to continue
attending.
2) I found the hotel costs really high. A good chunk of the entire cost of
going to the conference is the hotel.
I think Nat posted on this list, alternatives which was great.
But I actually wish I knew the alternatives before I had signed up. I
emailed someone directly in the beginning asking for alternatives because I
come from Singapore where the currency is much less than your US currency,
but did not get any alternatives.
Since I didn't know the area and don't have a travel agent I trust to
really know the hotel geography relative to the conference, I just reached
out of my ass and paid the high cost of being in THE conference hotel. Of
course, I do prefer to be at the conference hotel because it's more fun to
be close to the action, it would have been nice to have been given a choice.
I know that you guys probably get a lot of discount from Sheraton by having
them be the only hotel on the listed on the Web for the conference, but it
isn't at all convenient for conference attendees.
Why should each attendee manually call another travel agent to find out
alternative hotel costs (and not all travel agents REALLY know the area
well) individually when OReilly could be posting alternatives.
After all, you guys actually walked around the area and scouted out for
facilities and probably know what the hotel and conference situation is
truly like better than many travel agents sitting in their big office
buildings taking calls all day.
I just think that if you could provide a hotel that is like 3/4 the price
then you make the entire package (Hotel, Flight, Conference fee) that much
more attractive WITHOUT lowering the cost of the conference itself. If
sponsorship of the hotel is a problem, maybe they would be OK with a link
at the bottom that says
"Cheap People Click Here".
And it would take you to a page that explains the true alternatives for the
area if you can't afford to be in THE hotel. That would certainly help the
bottom line, especially of the self-employed. Government and other large
corporations will probably just go with the main hotel. And speakers should
be housed as much as possible in the main hotel (if it is subsidized). So
it's not like everyone would go for the cheapest alternative and Sheraton
would still feel like they are sponsoring something.
3) A really early bird discount.
If you know the basic location and time of the conference ahead of time but
way ahead of knowing the exact speaker make-up, give a chance to pay a
super low rate to lock in the conference. There are a lot of people who
perennially go to the conferences and trust OReilly will come up with good
speakers.
They would benefit from being able to lock in 6-9 months ahead of time to
pay for the conference in a really early bird registration. The benefit is
that you'd already start seeing attendees already signing up. How many
attendees sign up on the last day of Early Bird registration right now? I
would imagine it is a lot, but even that probably helps you figure out your
logistics.
So would there be any further logistics help by having a really-early bird
discount prior to the early bird discount in terms of conference planning
and getting true cash in your budget sooner than later?
4) Moving the conference to the east coast on alternate years.
I know this is a pain in the ass for logistics cuz you have to find a new
site every year. But it seems to me that plane costs are a good chunk of
the change as well.
SANS does this and I've always appreciated it. When I lived in the
Washington DC area, I always attended SANS on the years it was on the east
coast, but did not when it was on the West Coast for this very reason. They
always seem to have it in Monteray and Baltimore's Inner Harbour on
alternate years.
Why just always have the Perl conference in the west coast?
If you alternate it on the East Coast you also open up a lot more to Europe
without having it in Europe (5 hour versus 10 hour flight) and west coast
really dedicated people can still attend and vice versa for the next year.
5) Discounts for overseas
One complaint is that the conference is not anywhere but the USA.
Understandable. Perhaps it's easier to organize in one country. But it puts
the rest of the world at a disadvantage. So not only do we have to pay
hotel + conference but usually a fairly exorbitant plane ticket.
One thing that would be nice to offset overseas attendees is to state that
anyone outside North America coming to the conference could have a discount
off of the fee for every US$ above $500 that the plane ticket costs with
some cap on the discount like $500.
So if the plane ticket cost $1000, then I could get $500 off the conference
ticket with proof that my round trip ticket from Asia was so expensive. If
the plane ticket cost $600, then I would get $100 off.. etc...
This would also make things easier on the Europeans if you don't heed the
last idea about having the conference on the east coast.
Another reason for giving subsidies for overseas people coming over is that
many are strapped for cash due to weaker currency. US$ is one of the
strongest currencies in the world and this makes it quite difficult for
anyone except someone coming from London or Tokyo to pay the hotel plus
conference fee in US$. Helping out with the overseas attendee subsidy
would be most helpful and make the conference much more international.
6) Scholarships
Offer a discount for people who satisfy certain constraints. eg if you've
contributed to CPAN in the last year, give a $200 off the ticket even if
they didn't get to be a speaker. This allows more people who contribute to
the community to attend and make the conference more rich with people who
are really churning stuff out.
Right now, the scholarship for attending the conference is skewed solely
towards speakers. But more than just speakers have good stuff to offer as
attendees of a conference rubbing elbows with the other attendees, asking
interesting questions of the speakers to make more of the talks interactive
instead of an audience of just people who are absorbing information in a
1-way fashion.
[Summary]
Note that many of these ideas are geared towards allowing people who are
probably skipping out on the conference now due to cost to attend... and by
attending, even at a significant discount, to add to the OReilly bottom
line as well as making the conference a more interesting attendee mix
(international, students, and scholarships for active open source
contributers). As opposed to primarily middle-class USA programmers being
the majority of attendees that I tend to see at conferences like this.
Later,
Gunther
