Sometimes It Is Good To Be A Sellout
I need to start a self-help 12 step program for Eventbrite addicts. Every year, during registration season, I obsessively check Eventbrite to see who registered. Ok, what I really mean is I obsessively check it every week hour minute. I know when each and every one of you registered, because the attendance number moved a little and gave me a little thrill.
It's like a little video game where if I win, we have a fun conference. If I lose, we have empty halls and no audience for our awesome speakers. My greatest fear as a conference organizer is getting a bunch of sponsors and speakers to give their time and resources only to come to a mostly empty event. Remember the dream you once had of forgetting to wear pants one day and going to work? This is just like that, but magnified at least 400 times.
45 Days?
For some reason, people like to wait until 45 days out before registering en mass. Because of this tendency, conferences most always offer early bird rates. Part of it is to start the promotion, part of it is to put off the inevitable heart attack that comes 2 months before the event when the registration numbers look bad and the deadline is marching towards you like an angry horde of fire ants. Make that an angry horde of giant fire ants with lasers. Those green powerful stabby lasers....
I digress. I get why people wait to register, I really do. That doesn't stop me from going on the tweak every year and wearing out my refresh button checking the current Registration Count.
NCDevCon is in 35 Days
Take a look at the chart below. You can tell about when the 45 days left time period starts (Aug 14th). Notice the chart taking a huge upswing...
While we've sold about 50 tickets in the last 3 weeks, you can see the shape of the slope is heading sharply upward. It's always hard to forecast when the conference will sell out, but it looks like it'll be a few weeks earlier than last year's conference.
The 2011 conference sold out the week before the conference. Take a look again at the shape of the registrations during the 45 day period before the conference:
Here, we sold over 200 tickets in the last 45 days. Our sell-out point was 250 that year. We added another 15 or so just to see if we could handle the volume. Everything was fine so we made 260 the sell out period for NCDevCon 2012. It's a balance though because it is more important to have an intimate, local conference feel, rather than a huge conference
Attendance Matters
As a conference organizer, it's freaky how much attendance numbers matter. Attendance numbers matter to our sponsors, because they fund the conference for the opportunity to get in front of their target audience.
Attendance matters to our speakers, who spend their own personal time learning and preparing quality material. Speakers spend lots of personal time crafting their delivery and ensuring they are able to convey the information to attendees in the most beneficial and reasonable way.
The American Medical Association of Heart Attack Doctors says, "Good conference attendance wards off heart attacks in 9 out of 10 Conference Organizers" (note, we actually made this up. No one really said it. But it's now on the Internet so it has to be true)
Attendance also matters to our attendees, because it's no fun if you are one of 5 attendees at the whole conference, is it? There needs to be a sufficient number of others, to talk and network with and learn from.
Most importantly, attendance matters to us, the conference organizers, because attendance to our conference is the ultimate thank-you for all of the hard work put in by us and our army of volunteer staff.
It looks like we are on track for a sell-out crowd for NCDevCon 2012, if you've been considering attendance, it might be time to get on board before the conference fills up. You can register here: http://ncdevcon.eventbrite.com/ You can be assured, I'll still be pressing reload on the registration page when you register.