Charles Stricklin

When we left off, I’d asked you to gauge interest to see if organizing a WordCamp in your neck of the woods was actually feasible, to determine how loose or how structured you might want to make it and finally you should have come up with a couple of dates you’d consider, dates that didn’t conflict with larger conferences, nearby regional events, holidays, etc.

Now, let’s start talking actual planning.

Step 4. Pick a venue.

I’ll start this step off with a don’t, rather than a do. Don’t go looking to hotels as a venue! Hotels book conferences, not unconferences! Hotels will want you to secure what’s called “room blocks”, quantities of hotel rooms at a lower than normal rate that you, in turn, offer to attendees. Sounds good, right? Maybe, but it’s a financial risk you do not want to take. I’ll explain:

Suppose you expect 500 people to register for and attend your WordCamp. You ask the hotel for a meeting room or auditorium capable of seating 500 people. They tell you they’ll let you use The Fluer De Lies Ballroom, which accommodates 500 people nicely, for free if you agree to a 250 room block. They explain that their normal rate for rooms during the dates you’ve chosen for your WordCamp normally run USD$150/night, but your attendees will be able to rent rooms at a rate of USD$110/night. They then tell you the percentage of rooms rented is 75%. You agree to their terms, and you sign the contract.

Here’s what that all means: You’ve just agreed to ensure that 75% of 250 (or 188 rooms) will be rented for 2 nights at a rate of USD$110/night. You’ve just agreed to ensure that the hotel will receive $41, 630.00 when then contract comes due. “So what?”, you ask, “Probably half the people who’ll attend will be from out of town. Maybe so, maybe not, but how many people will blanch at paying USD$110/night and go on Priceline.com or some other service and find a cheaper hotel and stay there? There are even reports of other hotels advertising on Google, making it appear to be the official hotel for the conference when they’re really not.

Using the previous example, let’s say 100 people stay at the official hotel the first night and 50 of them check out, choosing not to stay the 2nd night. That’s 150 room nights. You’d agreed to 376 room nights. You’re liable for the remainder: 226 room nights at USD$110 = USD$24,860.00, and they’ll charge you fees and taxes on top of that.

Do not use a hotel as a venue! Not when there are plenty of equally good alternatives, most of them (relatively) free.

Look around for college, university or high school campuses that might let you hold your WordCamp there. Ask around for businesses. Work out deals with local technology companies who’ll let you use their unused company cafeteria on the weekend in return for a listing as a sponsor. You may very well end up having to pay for someone to clean up or provide security, but in the end, it’ll be thousands of dollars less than going to a hotel or conference center.

Things to look for in a venue:

1. Ample seating for the number you anticipate.
2. Ample parking, if in a region where most people drive cars. (If you live in New York City or similar locale, this becomes less important.)
3. Attendees should be able to bring cups of coffee, soft drinks or water bottles in with them.
4. Plenty of power outlets.
5. A sound system or, at least, the ability to set up one.
6. WiFi, or, at least, the ability to bring in additional nodes.
7. A nearby area to congregate, register people, hand out t-shirts and badges, network, possibly a desk to sell schwag or books, leave business cards, post jobs, etc.
8. A nearby area to feed the number of people you’re expecting.

Additional things that aren’t necessary, but good to have:

1. A “green room” where speakers and staffers might take a breather, prepare presentations, psych themselves up prior to leading a session, etc.
2. One or more areas for helping beginners set up blogs, try out plugins, look at other’s blogs, etc.

When negotiating with the property owner(s) be sure and discuss subjects like necessary insurance, fire codes, emergency contacts, when someone will be there and when the property will be open and available to you, and any other requirements they might place on you.

Step 5. Determine Pricing and Methods of Handling Money

Once you’ve agreed on a venue and secured it with the property owner, including signing any contracts required, then it’s time to start planning the actual WordCamp. At this point, it’s no longer a hypothetical exercise… it’s really starting to come together.

I’d suggest you decide if you’re going to charge to attend your WordCamp, and I’m going to suggest you do but, I’m getting ahead of myself.

You could, theoretically, place all of the financial burden of your WordCamp at the feet of your sponsors and not require your attendees to pay a single dime. Some unconference purists think this is the way to go, and if you’re in that camp, go for it! Just don’t be surprised if 500 people register for your 500 people-limited event, you have 500 t-shirts made up and 500 box lunches available for your packed house and only 120 show up.

Think of it: You hear about this free conference in your hometown, you register yourself and tell everybody in your circle of influence. They all register as well. The big day comes, but it turns out a big term paper is due Monday morning or, it’s Saturday at 9AM and you never wake up before noon on Saturdays. It didn’t cost you anything to register anyway, so, you stay home. Never mind that some corporate sponsor just wasted USD$20+ expecting you to be there. And you won’t be the only one, either. Lots of people who registered won’t show up, either.

People see that something is available to them for free and many times they place that as its value: nothing. Even at conferences where companies pay thousands of dollars to attend, the attendance rate is usually less than 50%, sometimes as little as 30%.

If you were to, for example, require they pay USD$20 at the time they register, they’d be more inclined to actually show up and at least claim their t-shirt. Plus, if they did decide to stay home, the cost of the t-shirt and likely all of their food would have been paid previously. At WordCamp Dallas, we had 170 people register and 155 show up, giving us a 91% attendance rate.

So, say you decide to charge to attend. What’s reasonable? USD$20? USD$50? My thoughts are: Enough to cover the costs of their being there. In other words, if their t-shirt and 2 meals cost about USD$20, charge $20. The cost should be low enough to not rule out cash-poor students attending, but not so low as to violate the “buy-in” we talked about in the paragraphs above.

You’ll need a secure way to collect the money, one that’s trusted over the Internet. You could simply set up a PayPal button, but what about additional information like t-shirt size? Will they be there both days? What about demographic information like gender, hometown, company name, URLs? What about speakers? Surely you won’t be charging them for admission!

A friend turned me on to Eventbrite, a service that handles all that for you. It’ll keep track of contact information for attendees, gather information using a survey you design, handle the payments… in short, everything you need to handle payments for your WordCamp. They work off a commission basis, so, for example, if you charge US$20/registered attendee, US$0.88 of that will be paid to Eventbrite. Then, PayPal will take its cut as well, so you’ll end up receiving about US$18 and change, but believe me, it’s worth it.

Step 6. Put Out the Call for Sponsors.

There will be costs associated with organizing a WordCamp that cannot and should not be covered by attendees themselves. For that, you’ll need to look to sponsors for help. There are two schools of thought on choosing sponsors:

1) Find local sponsors

Find local sponsors who are either willing to donate money to help cover expenses or goods/services in kind that you need to successfully pull the event off. Do you need coffee? Audio or video production expertise? Will you be serving lunches to your attendees? If you answered, “Yes,” to any of these questions, then consider approaching local businesses to supply these needs in return for considering them sponsors of the event.

2) Find national and international sponsors with an interest in blogging in general or WordPress in particular.

Web hosts, blog networks, coders-for-hire… there are lots of businesses out there who’d love to participate as a sponsor of a WordCamp. Not only are many of them made of the kind of people who enjoy going to these events, it just makes business sense to advertise to bloggers. Bloggers not only use the goods and services they use, but they also blog about their experiences with the goods and services! Add distributed audio and/or video from the event and it becomes an advertising bonanza!

Sponsors are integral to the success of your WordCamp, so we’ll cover how to deal with them in a future segment.

In the next segment, I think I’ll plan on covering speaker selection, the official blog, schwag and the importance of getting Automattic to assist you.

My last few months as the lead organizer of WordCamp Dallas have been fraught with fun, excitement, worry, obstacles, bureaucracy and general mayhem and confusion. One question that keeps coming up is a variation of, “How do I organize a WordCamp in _______________?”

So, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned in the hopes that maybe others will set out to spread the WordCamp experience elsewhere.

Step 1. Gauge interest.

The explosion of blogging over the last decade pretty much ensures that someone will be interested in coming to your WordCamp, just not a lot of people. You need to ask around to gauge the interest level of those in the surrounding area, since they’ll make up the bulk of your audience. Is there one or more colleges and/or universities nearby? Are there technology companies nearby? Is there a WordPress Meetup goup for the area? Do a search for blogs located in your area. If there isn’t enough interest in your hometown for a WordCamp, widen your circle and consider organizing or helping organize one in a nearby town or city. If there is, proceed to…

Step 2. Determine the overall structure of your WordCamp.

If you live in a large metropolitan area like London, Seattle, Tokyo, etc., you might want to consider actually organizing your WordCamp not unlike an actual conference where speakers are selected, scheduled and publicized in advance. You could organize the event into one “track” where sessions inhabit a single auditorium and progress in a linear fashion, or you could have several “tracks” in multiple rooms - one for beginners and one for developers for example.

Another way to structure the event is pure “BarCamp” style, where topics and speakers are not chosen in advance but instead come about organically from the ranks of the attendees. This is especially favorable when you’re dealing with smaller cities like Ruston, Louisiana; Sheffield, England or Edmonton, Canada… places where perhaps there’s one or more universities or some other reason why bloggers might congregate there, yet not large enough to warrant a full-blown conference. In other words, decide whether or not you’ll be dealing exclusively with locals, or whether people from across the country or across the world might want to attend.

If you’re encouraged at the prospect of people from outside your local area being in attendance, also consider making the event two or more days. If I live in London or Toronto, it’s a safe bet that people won’t mind flying in or, at least, driving from nearby areas. If you’re organizing an event in Starkville, Mississippi, count on making it only one day.

Step 3. Pick a weekend, and maybe even a few alternate weekends.

Weekends work better for unconferences. Company A might let employee B spend Thursday and Friday out of the office if it’s paying $2,000 to send him or her to a conference, but likely won’t for a free or $25 unconference. Besides, you want to attract people who are passionate about blogging and willing to pass up sleeping late Saturday morning or other weekend activities.

Pick a weekend that doesn’t clash with other events such as the Superbowl or Macworld Expo. There are several events where, if you schedule your WordCamp too close to theirs, they’ll win every time. Events such as TechCrunch, Gnomedex, South by Southwest, SOBCon, New Media Expo, Blog World Expo, Mesh, MacWorld Expo, just to name a few. Scheduling a WordCamp too close to Spring Break, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. are also bad ideas.

Also, don’t just pick one weekend, pick several as coverage. Maybe you hope Matt Mullenweg might speak and he’s not available on the weekend of your first choice. Maybe the venue you’d prefer has a piano recital booked that weekend. Be safe and choose alternative dates.

That should be enough to get you started

I’ll continue next time with venue selection, pricing and sponsors.