LechazoConf Budget

Here I am, again, the guy that only talks about budgets in conferences :P

We’ve closed the final budget for the lechazoconf. It is completely open, anyone can comment and I encourage you to do it if you have any doubts whatsoever. Here it is.

The big numbers are:

We were 203 attendees instead of the 220 estimated, so we spent 9.458,75€, a little less than the estimated 11.200€.

Revenue

These are the main sources of revenue:

Sponsorships Regular tickets (60 sold) Early tickets (65 sold) University tickets (16 sold)
4.550€ 2.479,20€ 2.148,25€ 264,32€
48% 26% 22% 2%

The earnings were split in half, almost 50% were due to sponsorships and the other 50% tickets.

Spending

So… where did we spend the money?

Food Venue Merchandising and marketing Party Speaker gifts Speaker trips
6.600€ 550€ 492€ 458€ 378€ 355€
70% 6% 5% 5% 4% 4%

Food

We spent 6.600€ on food, that’s about 70% of the budget. That includes 380€ in a vegetarian menu that was not very successful :(, 1.360€ in coffee, 3.040€ in the main menu and 1.625€ in lechazo.

Lechazo was really cheap, 13€ each “sword” and they are quite big. We were aware that we couldn’t pay for the regional dish (usually about 20€ per person in a restaurant) and it wasn’t feasible to cook for 200 people. I think that the brochettes were a huge success and with a mean cost of 10? euros per person… definitely a keeper.

The main menu was 19€ per person… a bit on the expensive side and it wasn’t spectacular. But I think it was Ok.

Other spendings

Venue

We managed to get a special price on the venue (just 5% of the budget) in exchange for 10 tickets :D

Merchandising and marketing

Rollups, lechazoconf letters, badges, pens… amounted to 492€. The most expensive item in this category were the stickers (!), 160,33€.

Speakers party

One of our mistakes (better do it for everybody but more on this on a later post), amounted to 5% of the budget, 458€.

Speakers

The gifts for the lightning talk tickets and for @oyabun amounted to 355€ and travel and hotel accommodation for the main speakers was 378€.

Most of them payed for their own travel and hotel and for that we are extremely grateful.

Recording

Just 127,20€, 1.3% (!) of the budget. And one of the most useful spendings.

Here are the talks for all to see :D

Donation

We finished the event with a surplus of 493€, about 2€ per attendee.

As we mentioned beforehand, any surplus would be donated to an NGO. We chose Proactiva Open Arms (we’ve donated to them in other events) and I’m pretty sure they welcome the donation :)

Estimation

The budget estimation was 7% off due to cheaper food and recording costs :D

About attendance

Valladolid is a small city (around 300k) compared to Madrid… but I would have loved to have more people in the event. I think the talks were really great and there are a lot of people here that could have benefited of the knowledge, they didn’t know the event, or they didn’t trust us… I don’t know.

It’s a bit frustrating to organize a meetup monthly, that you know could improve the lives of lots of people, solve their doubts and make them better professionals and see every day that you are only reaching the same people over again. And then listen to complains that “there are no meetups in Valladolid”, “no one organizes anything” or “I don’t know how I can improve” (real complaints).

Whatever.

Final words

This is a brief analysis of the budget. We’re happy to answer questions about it or the event.

We want to be transparent and open about how the LechazoConf is organized and, with that goal in mind, the next step will be disclosing the trello we used with all the tasks and formatted to quickly see when we did what. More information in the next posts (I can’t promise when, though) :)

PD: Pinchito has written about the budget for JSDayES, a very big conference in Madrid. I’ll wholeheartedly recommend that post.

PD2: I’ve spared you the details of several budgets I’ve been involved with (AOS14, AOS15, AOS16, AOS17, CAS16 and the upcoming CAS17). I’ll also be happy to answer any doubts about those events. But I do know it is a dull topic. No more budget posts in a while! :D