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Why do you need catering?

Conferences are all about coffee breaks. The coffee breaks are the conference.

Sitting around passively listening to lecturers is not a conference. It is a lecture, or as we call it these days, "live-action Vimeo".

Serving food and drinks to everyone at the same time is a way of keeping everyone together in the same space, where they can bump into each other, look over each other's shoulders, and convene spontaneous hallway meetings. That is what conferences are for. Otherwise we could just use Reddit.

In the end, you need catering because people at your conference want the catering. I spent hundreds of dollars per hour for the chance to stand with my colleagues in a space that's especially designed for meetings, but now I need to leave that space for several precious prime-time hours every day just to find food and eat it? Please, just sell me catering already!

I really enjoyed indieconf last year. I'd agree that the coffee breaks and time between lectures is where the magic happens. The catered lunch was very valuable too.

thank you. I'm glad you found it enjoyable and valuable. Did you stick around for the jazz trio too? I can't match the name 'hiccup' with who you are in real life :)

Instead of spending the money on food, we get a free extra room with selling enough rooms and we use it for people to sit, talk or do quick talks, what ever they like. This gives them the face time without costing us.

Thanks for eliminating the "schwag" waste. I also hate that crap.

Although sometimes taking on schwag is part of the deal you make with the sponsors - so no schwag means less sponsorship money and higher ticket prices.

You're spot on, and I've wrestled with this, and in at least two cases it's why I didn't get some sponsors who I'd contacted.

I'm about 90% certain we will be doing a separate 'sponsor room' this year, where sponsors will have their own tables/booths and can interact with people, it just won't be in the main hallways. I've seen it done well at a couple other events recently, and I think we can use that format, which means we may attract a few more sponsors this year.

The key is to serve the coffee/snacks in the sponsor room.

Another thing I've seen work well is run a competition with a small prize than involves attendees visiting all of the sponsor tables. Run it at the same time as a coffee break. It's fun, folk who don't care can opt out, gets a bunch of folk some face time with sponsors.

Also, on the schwag front, do what you can to persuade the sponsors to give out useful schwag. For example I've got a stack of branded retractable sharpies that I use every day. Somebody gave out some nice branded planning poker cards one time that I still have and use. Somebody else gave some nice single-card summaries of innovation games that I kept.

The bags, frisbies, pointless brochures... not so much.

Very important, though once you hit a certain size, it gets hard to keep everything on one floor (most people won't believe what hotels will do to cram multiple events into their venues).

You can offset the need for spreading out the coffee by having a fancier snack station in the sponsor room.

One big draw to the sponsor room (especially for summer conferences) are free ice-cream snacks. We had lineups to get into the sponsor room.

Can't upvote enough. Also great if sponsors want to be specifically involved in that process - they can directly see people using what they paid for and do something compatible (at PyCon this year, the Heroku booth had comfy couches where people drank coffee and talked with smart people - I'm certain everyone left with a positive impression)

Upvoted! ;)

Often it's a requirement if you have your event in a hotel. The hotel will sometimes have restrictions on who you can use to cater for breaks or lunches.

People expect coffee or drinks during breaks and will complain loudly regardless of the registration fee. $7-10 per person for a coffee break is not uncommon.

Minor point that made a couple speakers happy the first year - I had small break service (venue-speak for snacks/drinks/coffee) in each presentation room, vs out in a main lobby area. Apparently they like being able to get set up in a room then grabbing a quick cup of water before speaking without having to navigate back to a larger common area. Who knew? :)

Conference venue costs - While I'd prefer we were at a hotel, to allow easier movement for attendees and speakers (and better nightlife/restaurant selection) other venues I've looked at in the area start at roughly double what we're paying now. Oh, and then you have to add in A/V costs on top of that. Our conference center provides nice projection screens (huge) and nice mics as part of the rooms.

Catering - people need to eat. 99% of conference venues will not let you bring in random food, or in most cases even professional catering companies, unless they're on an approved list. Snacks/coffee/tea/etc throughout the day cost. Our food cost, including lunch, was north of $20/head. This is surprisingly cheap.

Power - some conference venues charge you for power access. $x/seat or something. We cut down on that this year compared to first year because few people seemed to use it the first years.

Wifi - our conference center has good wifi and it's free. One place I looked at said wifi access was $25/head/day. That's not a typo.

One of my goals was to have an event with non-local speakers. A barcamp is great, but... you end up seeing mostly the same people speak on the same topics. By having people from out of the area (state/region) speak, you'll be guaranteeing most attendees in the region won't have seen/met these speakers before. That costs something. Most of our speakers have been gracious with their time, but I wanted to at least cover some of their expenses in travel. With 20 speakers, and 8-10 with that sort of assistance, that's an additional cost.

I lost > $3k on the first event. ~$2k this time around, and would like to break even this year, or perhaps (gasp) make a small profit. A large profit would allow me to do regional versions of indieconf in different areas, bringing together a mix of local and non-local experts on various freelancing topics. That was the idea 2 years ago, but I can't commit to that until I know I won't keep losing money.

EDIT: oh yeah, insurance. The venue requires an insurance policy. For the minimum coverage, that's another... $600 or so.

EDIT 2: I would have probably broken even this year except for 2 things.

1) speaker dinner. Given the enormous effort many of our speakers put in (and travel) I like to have a low-key speaker dinner that's private for them to unwind. We have a few attendees that pay for a premium ticket to have a few dining hours for some one-on-one with our speakers. As fun as it's been, we may change that event this year.

2) After-party. This year instead of some ritzy club or venue, we had a jazz trio come in and had some catered snacks (veggie trays, etc). No alcohol, but I don't think anyone cared.

Without those two additional things, I think we'd have broken even this year on tickets and sponsorships. I'd rather not eliminate either one, as I think they each add something special for different groups.

Power can be a real issue. We had one sponsor who wanted a large meeting room, but they didn't take into account that they were expecting all the people in the room to use their laptops for an hour.

They sent someone to buy dozens of powerbars and extension cords which they chained throughout the room, plugged them into the wall sockets and then freaked out when the room went dark.

AV rental costs are insane. It is a field so ready for a disruption.

Venue wanted $5/head for power. First year that added > $500 to the event. Almost no one used it. So this year we had powerbars for the first row of seats in each room. They're there if you want/need them, but we're not all paying for them for the majority of people who didn't use them. Worked out well.

AV costs at one hotel I looked at was something like ~$300/day per room. That's ~$1000 extra, on top of the nearly double room rates compared to our current venue. It's just really hard to justify that extra expense just to be in a hotel. Yes, we're within walking distance of downtown, and there's some nice restaurants, but when I've been operating at a loss for 2 years... ;)

> Wifi - our conference center has good wifi and it's free. One place I looked at said wifi access was $25/head/day. That's not a typo.

At Minecon (a convention for Minecraft) in the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas they were (if I recall the figure correctly) charged $50,000 for wifi for 2 days. It's insane, especially when the wifi was absolutely unusable.

Certainly those rates should entitle one to an actionable SLA...am I clueless? I'm not trying to rag on unions at all (though what union would neteng be a part of?), but for insane money you should get insane service.

we paid more than double that for the network at Techcrunch Disrupt.

We had one venue that wanted to charge us $150 per Ethernet port "to turn it on".

That didn't include bandwidth charges which were included in a different line-item with WiFi which was based on buying blocks of 500 simultaneous users at an equally exorbitant rate.

Super informative stuff about conference hosting costs. Thank for sharing.