Budgeting WebCamp
In the spirit of community transparency, we decided to share our budget with you. The broad outlines were presented on the closing talk, but we decided to write up on it as well, for posterity's sake.
Putting this up online also allows us to present you with some more detail, as well as give you the final numbers, since at the time of writing the closing presentation we did not yet possess all the figures.
Disclaimer: the numbers may not be exact, but are pretty close. They are rounded to the nearest €100 for legibility. A fixed exchange rate of 7.65 HRK/EUR was used.
Income
WebCamp has two sources of income: sponsors and ticket sales. The sponsors accounted for about 2/3 of our total income. Early bird tickets were priced 300kn (€40) and Regular tickets were 500kn (€65).
| Income | Amount |
|---|---|
| Sponsors | €31,900 |
| Tickets | €19,100 |
| TOTAL | €51,000 |
In retrospect, we are pleasantly surprised by the ticket sales this year. Having ticket available until the last moment turned out well. The problem of not knowing the exact number of attendees was offset by earning some money for each new ticket.
Expenses
As the ticket sales kept coming in, we continued to invest the extra money we earned: larger projector screens, better catering, WiFi, and better quality t-shirts are some of the things we upgraded once we had enough money for it. The WiFi turned out to be notoriously insufficient, but other investments have paid off.
Here's a breakdown of this year's expenses:
| Expense | Amount |
|---|---|
| Swag | €9,700 |
| Venue | €9,500 |
| Food & drinks | €9,100 |
| Speaker hospitality | €6,000 |
| Drinkup | €2,700 |
| Hallway setup | €2,100 |
| Design & marketing | €2,000 |
| Ticket sale fees | €1,800 |
| Video recording | €1,200 |
| WiFi | €1,000 |
| Misc | €1,000 |
| TOTAL | €46,100 |
And to expand a little on each of these categories:
- Swag
- Goodie bags, T-shirts, mugs, stickers, pins, badges and lanyards.
- Venue
- Renting the venue and required additional equipment: projector, projection screen, audio equipment, stage, laptops, etc.
- Food & drinks
- Pastries and fruit for breakfast, catering for lunch, various snacks, soft drinks, water and coffee.
- Speaker hospitality
- Speakers' dinner, airport pickups, accommodation (mostly in Hypo center apartments), travel expenses for keynote speakers.
- Drinkup
- Beer from Nova Runda, open bar tab, cheese and meat pies, so we don't drink on an empty stomach.
- Hallway setup
- Interior designer who organized the floor layout, renting of sponsor booths and tables, electrical wiring, renting fridges
- Design & marketing
- Conference logo, identity and web design, ad campaigns and Buffer subscription.
- Ticket sale fees
- Entrio and credit card payment fees.
- Video recording
- Recording all talks in high definition, montage of video with slides.
- WiFi
- Wireless for attendees. Woefully inadequate as it turned out. :/ But we did get a discount in the end.
- Misc
- Approximate cost of various expenses which were not so easy to categorize in one of the above groups.
As previously mentioned, organizers are not paid, we volunteered our free time to make this conference happen. We did have a nice organizers dinner a couple of weeks after the conference that cost close to 5 late bird tickets.
In conclusion, we would like to thank everyone who either bought a ticket, sponsored the conference or gave a talk at one of our meetups and earned the ticket that way. You made the conference possible.
