Community Conference Financials
Conference Organizing By the Numbers
I am nearing one year in my role as a Developer Advocate and for the first time in my career I get paid to do community organizing work in tech. After 5 years of co-organizing conferences, teaching women to code with affordable workshops through the Girl Develop It chapter I founded, and speaking at countless events, panels, and presenting at meetups, it is exciting to me that I now get paid a salary to do community building work.
When I took my job last year, I took some well needed time off to re-calibrate my involvement with my city’s tech community, to reset my intentions and touch base with my motives with this work. After this time off, I decided to hone my efforts in three key areas: co-leading Girl Develop It Burlington, joining BTV Ignite as an executive fellow, and co-organizing UX Burlington.
I’ve written about how to support community organizers and have spoken about this at tech events around the country. Now, I think it might be beneficial for folks thinking about organizing conferences to know a bit more about the money side of conference organizing. So I’ll tick through each of the 5 community conferences I’ve co-organized and talk a bit about who got paid what at each.
My first conference organizing experience was with the Burlington Ruby Conference in 2013. After founding my Girl Develop It chapter early that year and starting the process of knitting together a vibrant community of techy women in my city, the organizers of the Ruby conference approached me with a proposition of partnership. I would help them with their diversity efforts for the conference, in exchange for a ticket to the conference and my participation as co-organizer. This meant attending conference calls to advise on decisions, lending advice on how to increase diversity in key areas, planning a Ruby workshop for Girl Develop It in conjunction with the conference, coordinating diversity scholarships, planning a ladies in tech lunch, and volunteering the day of the event. With my contributions, the numbers of women who attended the conference increased tenfold, and attendees marveled at the change in tone.
I was so excited at the outcome of this and working with the team of other organizers, that I stayed on as a co-organizer for a second year in 2014. I helped see the conference through another sell out year and oversaw further successes in increasing diversity and inclusion. Though I didn’t track my extensive unpaid contributions to this conference, I was happy to donate my time to my tech community and make a conference that was inclusive and intentional about it’s efforts. I loved providing an avenue for the people of my city to learn and interact with each other, as well as contributing to an event that attracted people from all over the world to check out our little tech community.
After Burlington Ruby 2014, one of the co-organizers approached me to say that he was interested in starting a new conference that could appeal to a more polyglot community of technologists, and wanted to know if I would collaborate on this effort. In 2015 we co-founded UX Burlington. I was working as a QA Engineer at the time, and so my work on the conference would have to happen outside of work hours. We agreed that we would split the profits of this conference, whatever they would be, based on our fundraising efforts and ticket sales. We split the work 50/50 and the decisions made for the conference were negotiated between us. His company would be the benefactor, fronting the money for the conference as we waited for sponsorship money to come in and ticket sales to return the investment.
It worked! The conference sold out, and we raised enough money for there to be some left over. But also the conference was wonderful. I was never a full time Ruby developer, though I dabbled a bit in my free time, so the Burlington Ruby conference stretched my limits in terms of my experience and network. But I have always loved thinking about user experience, especially in my work as a QA Engineer and working within agile scrum teams that practiced Lean UX. Organizing UX Burlington was a bit closer to my professional interests and goals, so this was even more rewarding.
If I were to calculate all the hours spent organizing this conference, the pay would have only been pennies per hour, but in the end any amount of money would have been fine with me. In return for my time and the fun I had making something that I believed in, I was also making my city a better place to live and work.
In 2016, a lot of crazy things happened in my personal life. I had a miscarriage, moved to a new house, changed jobs, and a dear friend committed suicide. I made the tough decision to take a year off from organizing UX Burlington (and also took a sabbatical from Girl Develop It.)
In spite of all this, in my Developer Advocate role, I was now getting paid to do community work for my employer and thus the majority of the community organizing work I did in 2016 was the work I did for my day job. Fortunately, I got to be on the team that founded the first Offline Camp in Jewett, NY, in June 2016. The people organizing Offline Camp were a mixture of community volunteers and people who got paid by their employer to do community organizing. Nobody got paid by the profits of Offline Camp, but we had a benefactor company who fronted the money for the (un)conference and agreed to shoulder the monetary risk in return for getting paid back by ticket sales and sponsorship money. I realize now how wonderful this gift was to the Offline First community, because this company not only believed in our vision for the event but had faith that we would do what needed to be done to make it successful.
And it was! We sold out and raised enough funds to have extra perks like a BBQ and a pool party for attendees. Any extra money raised would be saved for diversity scholarships for the next event. This was my first time organizing/attending an unconference style event, and my first exposure to the Offline First community.
I had such a great experience organizing Offline Camp that it helped me remember why I love being involved with building tech communities. I knew that I wanted to do this work again for my city. So when I got back from the conference I reached back out to UX Burlington to see if they would have me back for the conference in 2017. After a few months of back and forth, we agreed that I would lend my expertise and connections, but would negotiate the organizing time with my employer, rather than being paid by the conference.
Now, I’ve recently learned that the UX Burlington conference is going in a for-profit direction. I’ve learned that I won’t get an equal vote in the organizing process while using my paid work time toward an event where the other organizer(s) will be paid by the conference. As such, I‘ve decided that I can no longer participate in the future of UX Burlington. I’ve contributed about 30 work hours toward the organization of UX Burlington so far in 2017. I’m sad to let it go, but excited to figure out what I can do with all this extra time. Perhaps a hackathon? Perhaps another conference? Perhaps more Girl Develop It programming? If you are interested in starting your own conference, I recommend you read PJ Hagerty’s 3-part blog post series, The Thing about Organizing Conferences.
For now, I’m eternally grateful to every community who has allowed me to contribute to it, however great or small. You don’t make a community, truly your community makes you. I’ve gained so much from my time with each conference I’ve helped organize and I look forward to planning another one. So thank you to Burlington Ruby Conf, UX Burlington, and Offline Camp. Cheers to whatever comes next!
