The Organisers’ Problems
One of the problems that we, as organisers, find hard to tackle is ticket sales. For various reasons, ticket sales don’t pick up till the last few days. A lot of vendors can’t be confirmed and a lot of arrangements remain pending because we don’t know how many people will actually end up buying tickets.
Yes, the last WordCamp Pune was houseful but it can be considered a one off incident looking at the history of WordCamps and even this selling out happened very close to the event. It gets very chaotic towards the end and we end up spending more time worrying about how much to arrange instead of actually arranging for things.
In the organiser utopia, all tickets should sell out at least 2-3 weeks before the event so we can make the best arrangements and preparations without falling short or wasting important things like food and other resources.
An Experiment
So, when we went to the orientation hangout with a WordCamp Deputy, we proposed this idea of having discounted early bird tickets. We got a go ahead for this experiment in the hope that if it works out, other WordCamps around the world may try something similar, if they are up for it.
Due to the recent demonetisation and other problems with managing money at WordCamps in India, we ended up starting ticket sales much later than we had planned and our ticketing schedule ended up being tighter than we had hoped for.
Even then, within one week of opening ticket sales, we are happy to announce that we have sold 140 tickets. That’s almost 1/3rd of our total capacity. We’re hoping that this tempo continues and we sell out before the 1st of Jan and every participant gets a t-shirt.
T-shirts and T-shirtless Tickets
Any tickets bought after 31st December are not going to get a t-shirt because it takes at least 15 days to print and deliver t-shirts. 🙁
We want all our participants to go back with a wonderful WordCamp Pune t-shirt that reminds them of their experience and memories of this WordCamp for years to come!
So, this is a thank you to all of you who helped us organise things better by buying tickets in advance and not waiting till the last minute.
Special Thanks to Individual Sponsors
Alexander Gounder & Amit Patekar are two awesome community members who decided to go for tickets priced way above the regular tickets, just to support WordCamp Pune 2017 and help the organisers out. This idea of micro-sponsoring is something that we borrowed from WCUS and we hope more community members give as much value to the event as these two do.
More sponsors like them make sure that we cover costs and still manage to give scholarships and discounts to people who at times can’t afford a regular ticket or need a little extra encouragement/ help in attending a WordCamp. If you happen to bump into them at WordCamp Pune 2017, do give them a high-five on our behalf! 🙂
You can become an individual sponsor too. Just head over to the tickets page and buy a special individual sponsor ticket.