Nine months worth of teamwork and about $20,000 USD is what it took to build this non-profit conference for 400 attendees. it was hard work, but it was worth it.
The conference took place on August 18th, 2018; we started planning at the end of December 2017 and the first question we asked ourselves was “What are our main goals?” Community and great content. As simple as it sounds it wasn’t easy to achieve because it is, after all, all about the money.
Argentina is no first-world country and it is also uncommon to have tech conferences (JSConf and Ekoparty helped pave the way a few years back). Companies don’t usually cover employees’ tickets and with an average monthly salary of $900 / 1300 USD web developers can find it very hard, if not impossible, to pay their tickets out of their own pockets. Therefore, it is only a matter of mathematics. A $400 USD ticket might sound affordable in your home country but it definitely doesn’t work like that everywhere else.
Yes, scholarships help (see numbers below to learn what we did there) but they are only palliatives. Money is exclusionary. We don’t want to force people into having to rely on scholarships; doing that feels like creating a new barrier of entry. Not everybody feels they “deserve” this kind of ticket and no matter the efforts, some will never feel “worthy enough” to apply.
Ticket price is an integral part of our inclusion and community efforts.
(In case you are not familiar with it)
This beautiful country has a strange relationship with the US Dollar, it’s like a thing… Dual-currency or whatever you wish to call it. I’m pretty sure you can google a lot about that if you are interested. What’s important about it here is that currency exchange tends to be a roller coaster.
January 2nd, 2018:
1 US Dollar was equivalent to $18.76 Argentinian pesos
August 30th, 2018:
1 US Dollar was equivalent to $38.26 Argentinian pesos
While reading this document bear in mind that flight tickets, hotel reservations and even the conference catering is affected by the rise of US Dollar exchange rate and inflation.
Ok, so this is what you are here for. Without further ado, here are the two most important numbers:
| From Sponsors | $11,769 USD | 56.5% |
|---|---|---|
| From Tickets | $9,067 USD | 43.5% |
| Total | $20,836 USD | 100% |
We are more than grateful for each of our sponsors: Google, DataArt, Mercado Libre, Virtualmind, Stensul, Acamica, OLX and Mozilla. Without them, CSSConf Argentina wouldn’t have happened.
These sponsors provided:
Before we began looking for sponsors we made two important decisions:
Expenses that weren’t covered by sponsors were covered by ticket sales.
| Tickets sold (paid) | 262 | 66.2% |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets scholarships (free) | 70 | 19.5% |
| Tickets sponsors (free) | 28 | 7.1% |
| Tickets crew (free) | 32 | 8.1% |
| Total | 392 | 100% |
| Average ticket price ($9,067 USD / 262) | $34.6 USD (Ticket Holders paid an extra 6% charge of Eventbrite) |
|---|---|
| Money (from ticket sales) available per person ($9,067 USD / 392) | $23.13 USD |
| Money available per attendee ($20,836 USD / 392) | $50.15 USD |
Values are shown in Argentinean pesos (ARS).
Most expenses were in pesos, affected by the rise of the dollar. We took an average of 26 / 27 pesos per USD Dollar to make this graph, but bear in mind that numbers are not exact since doing that would require us to go back in time nine months through loads of emails and check each day with each value of US Dollar and… Nope.
| Taxes | $8,490 ARS | 1.55% |
|---|---|---|
| Organizing | $3,895 ARS | 0.7% |
| Speakers | $273,251 ARS | 49.35% |
| Communication | $76,168 ARS | 13.75% |
| Venue | $191,826 ARS | 34.65% |
| Total ARS | $553,630 ARS | 100% |
| Total USD | $20,505 USD | 100% |
What does... include?
| Money raised | $20,836 USD |
|---|---|
| Money spent | $20,505 USD |
| Money left | $331 USD |
No. As we said above, getting the exact values would take loads of our time (and still probably not be exact). We believe there are around 500 to 200 USD left
There are two possibilities, either save it for the next conference or spending it on translating and adding captions to videos. We will probably go for the latter even though it’s probably not enough money to do that with all the videos.
Life.
Soon, hopefully!
Nope, each conference has its own valid way of organizing, prioritizing and distributing funds.
Please email us at the conference email or DM us on Twitter (bear in mind we might take a few days to answer)
Thanks for reading, my friend.