Articles: Conference Resources

Help People Afford to Attend Your Conference

December 22, 2012

Running a conference - especially if you're new to conference organizing - is hard work. The most nerve-wracking part is making sure you have enough attendees to cover costs. But what if you could make it easier for more people to attend while selling more tickets?

This conversation was started thanks to a tweet by Matt Wheeler and kind of exploded from there.

The ideas here are mix-and-match firestarters for your conference. You know your fellow organizers and attendees better than anyone, so use what would work best for you. Keep in mind that some of these items may add more overhead time-wise to organizing, but they will help your conference be more inclusive and accessible (and potentially more profitable!).

(Note: These suggestions specifically relate to cost and focus on helping attendees afford to attend. I recognize there are a wealth of other reasons people may be unable to attend a conference, perhaps a topic for a future post :} )

Make attendees aware of low-cost options

Most conferences dedicate a page on their website to lodging, transportation, and food options. You can easily expand what you offer there to include:

  • Hostels, motels, airbnb, couch surfing, or other low-cost lodging in the area
  • For hotels that provide shuttles from the airport/hotel/to the venue, include any associated costs
  • Link to a google group or similar place to allow people to setup room or ride shares with other attendees. This can also connect local people who are willing to allow someone to stay at their home or are willing to pick people up from the airport.
  • Public Transit options, including costs and whether they can be paid in cash or if tickets/tokens are required
  • Shuttle and taxi information, along with average cost from the airport to the venue area
    • Bonus points: offer conference-paid shuttles going from the airport to the venue area
  • If you aren't providing meals, create a list of low-cost restaurants (or link to a specific yelp search for the area), grocery stores, or bodegas in the area. (Beyond those with budget constraints, your attendees with dietary restrictions will be happy for this list!)
  • If you aren't providing childcare, provide a list of reputable and trustworthy childcare facilities in the venue area
  • Provide information on how an attendee can talk their boss/company into covering their ticket + travel. Webstock has an excellent example of this.

Attendees

Every conference has attendees that won't have an issue with the cost of a conference ticket, travel, lodging, or other expenses. These attendees may be willing to help others if you give them the opportunity.

  • Allow people to pay more for their ticket. Add a "chip in!" option during ticket checkout. This can be especially successful during Early Bird Ticket time when they can pay more to help someone else, while still paying less than the full ticket price.
  • Allow people to purchase an additional partial or full ticket to help another person attend. Create a "Scholarship Sponsor" sponsor level to add these people to and be sure to thank them during the conference.
  • Allow people to pay an additional 50-100% for their ticket to attend the speakers/sponsors dinner.
  • Create a ticket price tier. (To avoid a feeling of hierarchy within the attendees, do not advertise the ticket tier on the attendee badges.)
    • volunteers get in free, or at a discounted rate
    • students (with a valid school ID) get a discounted rate. Couple this with approaching local colleges and universities (your best bet is to find an instructor/professor in the appropriate program) about letting their student know about your conference and the discount they'd receive.
    • self-employed individuals get a discounted rate (I'm not sure how you'd validate this?)
    • have scholarship or "diversity" tickets? Add your conference to Diversity Tickets
  • First-time attendees get a discounted ticket if purchased with a full-price ticket.
  • Host a fundraiser to raise money for your scholarship fund.

Speakers

  • Announce your CFP as early as possible to allow people to start looking around for airline tickets, taking time off of working, arranging childcare, etc. If you pay for any speaker expenses or have a scholarship fund, announce it at the same time so those who wouldn't otherwise be able to speak/attend can get that information.
  • If you are paying for your speakers' travel, lodging, and/or other expenses, give them the option to donate those costs into your scholarship fund.
  • Alternatively, allow them to donate those funds toward the purchase of a ticket, which the conference will give away in their name.

Sponsors

  • Approach organizations and businesses that can benefit from getting more people into the community, such as online educational programs, web hosts, or other services that are useful to users of all ability levels to donate to your scholarship fund.
  • Denote that within each sponsorship (at any level), 10% of the cost goes towards your scholarship fund.
  • Give local restaurants sponsor credit for giving attendees a discount on meals purchased at their restaurant when they present their conference badge.

Spread the love

Sometime during your conference, announce how much you were able to raise in your scholarship fund and how many people (without pointing out said people) you were able to help attend. Encourage other conference organizers to talk to you about how you ran your scholarship fund and offer to donate a portion of your leftover scholarship funds (if there are any) to theirs in exchange for a Scholarship level sponsorship.

Resources

Featured on the /dev/hell podcast

November 26, 2012

Dev Hell Show logoRecently I went on the /dev/hell podcast with Reg Braithwaite to discuss encouraging diversity and inclusiveness at tech conferences and in our community in the wake of the BritRuby controversy.

Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think!

So you want to put on a diverse, inclusive conference

November 18, 2012

As someone who has organized 20 or so conferences over the past 10 years, I can tell you: organizing a conference is hard. It takes a lot of time - way more than you initially thought when you agreed to organize a conference. It's hard work. It's expensive. It's nerve-wracking. Organizing a conference also represents a lot of risk - what if no one shows up? What if we don't get good speakers? What if the wifi goes down? 

The thing a lot of (especially first time) conference organizers forget to focus on is driving diversity to their conference both through speakers as well as attendees.

It's a complicated issue - most people in technology fields are white, male (specifically cisgender male), straight, abled, speak English as their first language or have had to learn English, and are between the ages of ~20 and late 40s.

So if the community is rather homogenous, how do keep our conferences from being homogenous as well? 

Educate yourself! Why is it important and why does the problem exist?

It's difficult to understand why the problem exists, why things need to be changed, or how we can encourage change if we don't educate ourselves. It is each of our responsibility to educate ourselves about what it's like to be a member of a marginalized group. This education encourages empathy within us and our communities and promotes positive change.

My friends Bryan, Lindsey, Steve, and Julie have all covered this pretty succinctly, take a look at these relatively short videos on this subject:

Make your intentions known and ask for help

  • Ideally your organizing committee should look as diverse as the community you want to create. Even if you're unable to find people who can dedicate the time and energy into helping you organize an entire conference, many people are willing to sit with you to discuss your current plans and how they can be improved.
  • Send emails or tweets to people in the community who have experience creating diverse, inclusive communites or have a lot of reach. You'd be surprised how many people you can reach just by asking someone to tweet that you need help finding women, people of color, LGBTQ people, etc to submit proposals to your conference - especially when this is an issue so many people are affected by.

One of the first things I notice about a conference when I am checking out their website is what their speaker lineup looks like. Is it the same people I see at every conference? Are they all white, straight (or straight-passing), men? Sadly the vast majority of the time all of these are true.

Last May I attended Farmhouse Conf 2 which boasted a 50/50 split of male and female speakers. The conference itself was amazing and each speaker provided a unique perspective. So diversity in speaker lineup can be done, you just have to make it a priority.

How do you advertise that you want to see a diverse community at your conference when you don't already have one?

  • Admit you have a problem. There is nothing wrong with going to colleagues or to twitter and saying "We want to provide an inclusive, diverse conference experience, but we need help. Can you help us?"
  • Explicitly ask for constructive criticism. Write a blog post on your conference's site explaing what you have done and ask where you are going wrong or what you might have forgotten. Maybe you didn't notice that all of the pictures on your conference site are of white people or that the language you use in your CFP is gendered.
  • Be gracious, humble, and kind. It's hard to hear that you may have misstepped or made a mistake, but it happens to everyone. Before responding to criticism (constructive or not), take some time to examine the truth in it. For best results, ask an unbiased third party to examine the evidence and the criticism and help you understand the problem. Then, humbly apologize and make known the steps you're taking to correct the situation.

There are lots of simple things you can do to make people feel welcome:

  • remove gendered language from your CFP or other materials referring to speakers and attendees
  • ask a group like RailsBridge to offer a workshop alongside your conference
  • anonymize proposal submissions before going through them. This includes removing gendered language.
  • ask a diverse group of people to review your proposals.
  • create a diversity statement and an anti-harassment policy. Verify the links to them are easily found on your website and in any emails you might send out. 
  • on the registration, ask attendees if they need any special accomodations
  • offer tshirts in men's and women's styles in a wide range of sizes for both
  • offer full or partial scholarships and student rates for tickets

Don't play the blame game

The absolute worst thing you can do is shift blame. It is our responsibility as conference organizers to make everyone feel welcomed, accepted, and safe in our communities.

We have a long way to go before the numbers of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups represent the same percentage of people in tech as they do in the general population. The biggest drivers for creating that balance are employers, conferences, and educators. We are ambassadors and should represent everything we want to see in our communities.

(Plus, essentially blaming the victims makes you look really bad and does not endear your event to sponsors, speakers, or attendees.)

Offer your help

  • Is someone organizing a conference in your area? Ask how you can help. Offer to put together an anti-harassment policy or a diversity statement or invite your friends and colleagues to submit proposals.
  • Mentor. One of the ways you can have the biggest impact is to mentor people trying to make it in your field. Encourage them to submit proposals for conferences and help them edit or practice their talk. Building confidence is key!
  • Stand up when you see something wrong. We all have a duty to speak up when we notice something wrong. Marginalized groups need allies more than anyone else as detractors are unlikely to listen to them if they speak up for themselves.

Other Resources

A handful of links that I send to people on a regular basis when the subject gets brought up. If there's something you think I'm missing from this list, please let me know - I'm happy to add to it! :)