Tips & Tricks to organize a tech event with less than 30€
Throwing an event to attract potential clients or to increase brand awareness is becoming really popular. In Barcelona, where I live, there’s at least one such tech event every day!
For me, it’s just a question of love: I LOVE organizing tech events, from their inception to their implementation. I apply a startup approach (i.e. boostrapping as if there were no tomorrow!) and it’s so satisfying bringing like-minded people together and seeing how even a low budget event can really foster new collaborations and cool projects.
I’m also aware that they are an effective channel to promote a business: you have the chance to meet your audience, engage with them, and eventually transform them into a valuable lead for your business.
We live in a digital era, but the human component remains something that online business should not underestimate.
Because my events have always been for art’s sake, and with the desire to build something from scratch without any strings attached, I’ve always struggled with tight budgets (usually zero budget!).
So in the last years I learnt some tricks and hacks to build an event investing really little money.
In this article I will only give some practical tips for small/medium events (50–100 people) because a bigger one always implies an initial investment. I’m aware that a lot of stuff is missing. Stay tuned for my next articles 😉
Count on your tribe and build the event around it.
It was really useful using my network to find inspiration and content for my events: Inter[Act] was actually born because I have a friend working in VR, another has an interactive lighting system startup, etc.. The second edition of the event counted with projects that were presented to me thanks to word of mouth after the first one.
In this way I saved a lot of time looking for content, while I found interesting and challenging building an event around what I had on hand.
I also saved money because: A. my friends are awesome! and B. I convinced them that participating to the event (for free) would be really good for them and their businesses.
Find the venue and beers for free
The venue and the beers are a key-aspect for the success of your event: you want people to be amazed by the venue and to have fun. And, of course, beer is fun and facilitates networking 😄
I must admit that finding a venue for free is becoming trickier, and landing a beer sponsor even more!
The best options are coworking spaces: they usually have enough room for the event, they might be already sponsored by a beer brand and they own basic material that you will need (tables, chairs, projectors, cables etc).
Moreover, if they opened recently, you’ll get even more chances to get free space and beers (In this case you’ll have to work a bit harder to promote the event as they won’t have a big network as an established firm).
Promote your event
I promoted an event via Facebook Ads only once (with little results), but I usually don’t put any budget on ads and, besides the typical social media posting, I promote the event in the following ways:
- By involving third party collaborators (i.e. speakers) you’ll expand your audience as they will communicate the event in their own networks.
- As an event platform I prefer Eventbrite: it’s an easy ticketing tool that allows you to keep track of your attendees as well as promoting the event in their own platform. And it’s free as long as your events are free as well. I have also used Meetup (that BTW it’s not free anymore)but you have to consider if it fits with your audience and that you won’t be able to track who actually came to the event (this is very important for the follow up after the event).
- Use attractive visual communication: the more your event poster/banner is easy to understand and beautiful to see, the more interest you’ll generate in your audience. (I use Affinity Designer, a cheaper alternative to photoshop)
4. Send custom email to key-people: for Retrogamingbcn events I usually invite via email game companies employees or influencers (I use FTL to get their emails via Linkedin and YAMM to send them), telling them a bit about the event and how great it would be having them share their experience and knowledge with the other attendees.
Hosting the event alone is possible, but you pay a price.
I strongly advise you find, from day 1 of your event planning, someone you can count on for at least the day of the event. I didn’t for a few of my events because I didn’t have budget to hire someone (you can have a host/hostess for 100€ per day) and I thought I could manage everything alone. And I have actually, but I had to sacrifice some important aspects of the event such as:
Attendee registration: last minute problems forced me to leave the entrance. This means I couldn’t track the leads after the event.
- Networking: instead of making people comfortable and fostering connections, I was refilling beers, taking pictures and doing social media posting (to solve this last one I started to prepare drafts before the event and I just upload the picture in real time).
- Stress. A LOT of stress!
Where did I spend the 30€?
Well, it depends: once I had to buy more beers because the event was going very well and I didn’t want to kill the vibe (Amazon Prime Now and Glovo FTW).
Once I put that money for some nice details: Haribo for everyone!
Once we had to solve a last minute problem as we couldn’t fit the beers in the venue fridge so I bought ice (again, Glovo saved the day).
And another time I invested in offline marketing and I printed out the event poster and flyers.
I hope some of these real-life event planning aspects will be useful for your first/next event!
Feel free to comment below or drop me a line at info@giuliamotteran.com if you have any questions 😊.
