Reducing Conference Costs

It is by far the number one complaint we hear from attendees:

“This conference is too expensive!”

How can you charge less to attend the conference? There are only two ways: 1. Increase Revenues 2. Reduce Conference Costs

Increasing Revenues:

One way to make a conference less expensive is to increase the income.

Increasing the revenue and income opportunities gives you more latitude to offer more services, more scholarships, and of course, make certain that you are profitable and can afford to do this again next year!

Some of the “line items” on the income side that are overlooked include:

1. Hotel Commissions
2. Sponsorships
3. VIP Registrations
4. Grants
5. Virtual Attendees
6. Monetizing the Videos
7. More Conferences

Each one of these can be expanded to uncover additional revenues. For example, do you know that most hotels will pay a significant commission on the people you bring?

Many societies don’t know this, or, even worse, give up the commission to someone who negotiates their hotel deals for them. I think you can do better – and let us negotiate your hotel deals AND return the commission to your “income” column.

Increasing Sponsorships:

Then there are a dozen ways to increase your sponsorships with some creativity. Some ideas to brainstorm include:

• Why do companies sponsor? Do they repeat? Why? Have you asked them? Can you learn from this which other companies might want to sponsor?

• Who is sponsoring a similar conference but not yours? Can we team up with another event and sell both events together as a package? This way you have two sales teams selling higher-value items to their trusted customers.

• Can we offer “VIP registrations" for twice or 3x the regular price, so that industry executives can “expense” them – and this way support the conference? … and there are many others we have seen, and used successfully.

Virtual Attendees

Let us not overlook other ways to increase income. While you may attract a certain number of people in person, ask yourself “how many people want to come but either cannot afford it financially, or cannot get a visa, or clear their schedule… or only want to attend part of the event?”

For these people, we can offer some “Virtual Attendance” option, either during the conference, or even after the event concludes.

All these are ways to get more people paying SOMETHING for the conference.

You also open it up to more students (especially foreign ones) who want to contribute to your community but can’t make it in person. All of this adds up without incurring costs, and we smilingly call that ‘very welcome additional income.’

Windowing Pricing Strategies

Have you thought about other ways you can monetize the videos of your past events? We have done this very successfully for many societies. They do this in the movies all the time, it’s called a “Windowing Strategy,” – where you pay the highest price in the theatre, then a lower price for the streaming services, then a lower price for cable and then lower for ad-based over the air TV. You can do the same:

• The highest price for conference attendees
• A lower tier for post-conference virtual conference
• A Lower tier after 6 months
• Lower yet after 12 months

And you can even experiment with different ideas and pricing formulas to see what offers the highest yield. Using the Underline platform, this is all built-in and available to you with no additional cost.

More Conferences, Really?

Did you say do more events? Are you serious? I can barely get through this one!

Actually, the more engagement you have with your user base and members yields increasingly more income, long-term retention and renewals. You don’t need to do in-person extravaganzas every month. How about a monthly or quarterly virtual half-day or full-day symposium? It is easy to organize, super-inexpensive to execute (especially if we are doing it for you!) and keeps your membership engaged… and feeling like they are getting more value from you every day.

Reducing Costs

There are many strategies we can employ to help lower costs. One mistake is that organizers look to ‘cut costs’ and in the process, cut needed services, thereby diminishing the user experience for attendees. You want to avoid this !

One conference totally cut out all food and coffee breaks – and boy, was there a backlash!

Obviously, we want to increase revenue and cut costs. So let us take a quick high-level look at some of the largest cost and revenue items and some quick-fixes for each.

Cost Categories:

On one hand you want to control the costs (and reduce them!) without affecting the fun, spirit and effectiveness of your event. The top cost items usually are:

• Venue
• Audio-Visual and related Technology
• Food & Beverage
• Printing / Signage
  Perhaps there is not much you can do about the Venue at this point (though moving is something many conferences have done quite successfully if there is a contractual ‘out’).

However, you can certainly do something about the AV and other technology.

The first thing is to have a consultant who knows what you need and will not sell you more than you really require. That is something we specialize in, since Underline does not look to make a profit on the AV we supply.

We can also consult on strategies for each of the other items in the list since each one should require an article of it’s own.

Take Food & Beverage for example. You need to keep the people hydrated, with coffee & snacks. If you can afford a full meal service, that is ideal.

But you can trim the excesses… instead of a choice of 4 mains, find something acceptable to each category of cuisine (and don’t pick the most expensive thing on the menu just because the hotel suggested it!)

Everything is a balance – and achieving the perfect balance is an art…

Printing: How much do you really need to spend on printing? What can be done digitally and accessed on the phone instead of in printed handbook form? These are but some of the ideas – there are many others we can explore in a no-obligation brainstorming session – just click this link to schedule at your convenience.

About Underline Science Events Underline Science specializes in Scientific conferences, having produced more than 200 events. We help to produce a smooth and successful, profitable conference. Our aim is to grow your conference and reach. We aim to increase your membership engagement and value to your constituents. We are experts in Audio Video (which we do in-house) and technology, usually one of the largest conference costs. Societies we serve include IEEE, AAAI, ACL, ACM, SEB and many others. Don’t take our word for it, contact our very satisfied repeat clients. Let us introduce you to happy associations we serve who keep coming back for more. Click this link to contact us for a no obligation introductory brainstorming session.