This post is long overdue. After the previous two in this little series (Part 1: context, total costs and donations, Part 2: attendees-donators ratio, donations break down and average donation) I meant to write a third post about costs per attendee and their break down plus some hints at how to improve the situation but I’m here going to concentrate on the latter: simple ways to improve the situation.

Transparency

Let’s start from the single most effective action that can be done to increase the number of donations: transparency! I was hoping on this and it did happen: being transparent and publishing all the numbers gently invited more people to donate

In fact since my first post and because of it I got 14 more donations for a total of €313.73 (as usual this is net, subtracting PayPal charges). This brings the donators/attendees ratio up from 14% to 17%:

but it also brings the average donation down from €43 to €38

That is lower than the 2007 edition average but I believe it’s fine: I prefer lots of small amount donations rather than just a few high amount ones because losing donators wouldn’t have a big impact, it’s not like the conference depends on a very small group of people (which is the main reason why I decided to stop looking for commercial sponsors in the first place).

Visibility

The second most effective thing it’s something so simple it’s easy to forget (and indeed I didn’t pay enough attention to it): the fact that you believe everyone knows the conference is funded by donations doesn’t make it true!

I think I slacked a bit on this because it was the third edition funded by donations and I just assumed everyone knew about it by now or, if they didn’t, they couldn’t possibly miss it. I was wrong and even though:

• it’s clearly stated on the conference homepage
• it’s repeated on almost every page of the website
• when someone registers to the conference the confirmation page presents the PayPal button
• the confirmation email includes a link to the PayPal page
• during the opening of the day I thank the donators and project their names on the wall

no matter all this I shouldn’t just assume everyone reads everything. Most of the people are probably filing out the form as quickly as they can and then forget about it. Will need to think about new strategies for next year to make sure everyone knows about the donation without annoying and spamming (too much at least….). There is lots to be learnt in the field of fundraising and luckily I have a few friends who do this for a living.

Pay-for activities

I want the conference to be free going forward and I don’t want to consider registration fees no matter are low. At the same time I don’t want this position of mine to constrain the conference knowing that there are things that need more money to be done properly.

An example are the workshops we organised this year: they were hugely successful and because I limited the number of attendees to keep them effective they sold out in the first 3 hours (yes, you read it right: we organised 6 workshops with a maximum of 14 people each and they sold out in the first 3 hours!).

One thing I’m considering is to charge a low fee for the workshops only. It would allow me to reimburse the workshops speakers a little and use some of that money to fund the conference. This would also make it possible to organise them better, with more time and facilities.

Conclusions

What started as a way to gather a bunch of people who shared an interest (a hub!) has become a major effort and it would be easy to give up and just start charging for the conference, afterall I keep getting emails saying this is the best conference of the year in comparison to both free and non-free ones

But the main goal of the Italian Agile Day is to allow as many people as possible to spend a day together sharing knowledge and experience and I still feel it must be free.

In the first post of this series I walked you through a bit of history behind the Italian Agile Day conference and the switch to a donation based funding model. In the very last paragraph I published the first numbers: costs and total donations collected for the last 3 editions:

And I wrote that 2 things immediately jumped at me: that I became really good at organizing conferences with a low budget and that this year’s edition broke even thanks to some money left over the previous year.

There is a third thing though: this year’s donations are less than those in 2007! The reason is that I want to expand on this in this post, there is much more behind it that it initially appears.

Donators & Donations

First of all I’ll take out the €479 from the Agile Alliance (€500-PayPal charge) because it comes from the Conference Sponsorship Program and it’s something I can rely on, it’s not based on people goodwill and it’s not from someone who actually attends the conference.

The total donations collected by year now become:

• 2006: € 1,219
• 2007: € 2,326
• 2008: € 2,215

and these are the numbers we will use for our analysis. We also need to know more about how many people registered to the conference, how many effectively showed up and how many people donated. Here they are:

Remember that every year I cap the registrations and then manage cancellations and waiting list according to the venue’s capacity. As can be seen while registrations and attendance have been growing organically (and the difference between the two within a year is sort of the same), donators haven’t increased. On the contrary!! There were 6 less donators this year.

These are important figures that help me making informed decision for next year, I’ll be able to ask for feedback to the community and work out a refined model – of course I’ve got quite a few ideas already. But I find even more interesting the following two charts.

The first one shows the percentage of donators and a worrying decline that needs to be tackled:

This chart actually shows what I was fearing before the conference: growing the conference each year with 50% of new people means more and more of them don’t feel like blindly donating to something they don’t know the value of (yet). There is something that can be done about this but I’ll save it for the last post in the series

The second chart is about the average donation per year and shows a promising trend with a clear message: people who donated believe there is an increasing value in the conference, probably because they attended a previous edition:

More importantly there is a 87% increase in the average donation between 2006 and 2008. This is promising and this is how I managed to break even this year even though the donations were less then last year while the costs were higher

Next post

In the next installment I’m going to write about costs per attendee and their break down plus some hints at how to improve the situation.

Thanks for reading!

As I wrote in my first post on this blog among other things I’ve been organizing a conference about software development methodologies in general and Agile ones in particular for the last 5 years.

It’s called Italian Agile Day (yes, the website needs updating, working on it for next year…) and it’s:

a free one day conference about all aspects of agile software development. The conference focus is on software development methods that follow the Agile Manifesto including: eXtreme Programming, SCRUM, Feature Driven Development, DSDM, Crystal and Lean Software Development.

The conference has organically grown:

• Milan, 2004 -> 100 attendees
• Milan, 2005 -> 150+ attendees
• Milan, 2006 -> 180+ attendees
• Bologna, 2007 -> 260+ attendees
• Bologna, 2008 -> 400 attendees!!

Funding models: commercial sponsorship vs donations

For the first two editions (2004 and 2005) I went to usual route for free conferences: commercial sponsors + an Agile Alliance contribution. It worked well and let me kick this off concentrating more on other aspects (logistics, speakers, program, marketing and so forth) rather than worry about funding. That was relatively easy because it was a very small conference – and I became and expert in low-budget conferences

In 2006 though I felt like making a community experiment: this is a conference for the community by the community and instead of looking for commercial sponsors I opened up a PayPal account and started accepting donations. Real donations as in no minimum amount required and more importantly people don’t have to donate in order to participate.

Granted: to make this work I personally guaranteed that regardless of the total amount collected the conference would happen. I didn’t want people to think “what if I donate and then money isn’t enough?”. It did work, we got € 1,698.25 in donations and spent € 1,500. Although the numbers were low everyone was happy: there was a community and it was able to support itself!

I’ve always limited the number of attendees, closing registrations when 150% of the capacity was reached to factor in the natural drop rate – that for a free conference is higher than for other models – and managed a waiting list moving people around as soon as someone canceled his/her registration.

Do donations scale?

This year I decided to go big and booked a place for up to 400 people but I wondered whether the donation model would keep working, I had a feeling it wouldn’t scale and here is why: every year something like 50% of the people attending the Italian Agile Day are new, they have never been to the conference before and I imagined that they wouldn’t blindly donate. If I were in them I would attend the conference the first time and only after decide whether it is worth a donation or not.

And in fact this is what happened. Now that I have 3 years worth of data I’m going to do some analysis and publish all the numbers in this series of posts hoping it will help others and for the sake of transparency.

Some numbers: costs and money collected

Let’s start from each edition’s cost and donations collected. Because PayPal takes a percentage of every donation I’m using the net numbers, afterall this is what I have available:

The first two things that jump at me are:

1. I became really good at organizing a conference with a low budget those costs include venue and coffee breaks
2. This year edition broke even thanks to the money left over the previous year

If you prefer a chart here it is:

I’ll leave it here for now. In the next post I’ll disclose all the other numbers: people registered, people effectively attending, number of donators, average donation and so forth. Stay tuned