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Tickets
Please note that $690 was raised in 2011 for scholarships for next year! This must go in the budget and should be paid from the foundation.
As far as I can tell, guessing ticket prices is 100% voodoo. When we did it, we set a budget and then went backwards to guess how much we should charge. We grossly underestimated the number of tickets we would give for free (high level sponsors, volunteers, irc superstar winners, etc).
- Free tickets at $0: 16 (8 of those went to volunteers)
- Early Bird tickets at $275: 103
- Speaker tickets at $275: 30
- Student tickets at $225: 7
- Full price general admission at $350: 104
- Other at $300: 5
Total income in ticket sales for was $76050.00.
I think one thing that worked particularly well was having the speaker rate be the same as the early bird rate. This way we didn't have to worry about dealing with refunds or any of that mess.
This year we didn't offer group discount rates but I would highly suggest that for next year AND advertising it. The question was asked a lot.
We didn't offer refunds or transfers publicly but did end up processing a few transfers when people begged and/or had extreme situations. I would keep this policy in the future. It could get out of control.
To simplify things, we used BrownPaperTickets.com (BPT) and hooked it up to a merchant account. This was nice because it simplified the process and we didn't have to test/implement a front end.
We looked at 3 options: BPT, Event Brite, and Inticketing. We chose BPT because it was the cheapest and had a decent API. Trainers ended up all using Event Brite for their training fees.
Some things that were missing:
- Group ticket purchasing sucked. We tried to get info on things like tshirt sizes and if you bought tickets for more than one person it only asked the question once.
- Doesn't require the email for the conference attendees. In the future I would make sure that you have an email for EVERY conference attendee, not the orderer. This because prominent when we had to send out announcements and the mailing list was completely borked, leaving some people out of the loop.
- Reporting wasn't the best but was sufficient.
- We couldn't manually process transfers or refunds and had to call BPT each time.
We created a irc bot for the event using the BPT API and hooked it up to the #ploneconf channel for immediate stats. TODO: post that code!
In summary, BPT was the cheapest option but I may recommend people to try Evenbrite or something else to see if we can get a better data collection set. The BPT UI also leaves a lot to be desired. A fully integrated UI would have been nice but I don't think it was a deal breaker by any means and it saved us load of time.