JSHeroes 2018 Transparency Report
JSHeroes is the biggest tech event in Romania dedicated exclusively to JavaScript based technologies. For this year we’ve prepared a more ambitious plan than for 2017’s edition — we will have a day full of workshops and two conference days, with the help of more than 20 international and local JavaScript experts and we’re expecting between 600 and 700 attendees.
The event will take place at Grand Hotel Italia, in Cluj-Napoca, and it’s organized by Cluj JavaScripters, one of the most active JS communities in Europe. We strongly believe that the community model is the best environment for learning, so we’re publishing all the data about this conference, in full transparency, to make it easier for other communities to build on our knowledge and organize even better events (see last year’s example).
This time we’re going to talk about money. The estimated budget for the 2 conference days is 87.200 EUR. Why?
The expenses presented below could shed some light on what organizing a conference means in terms of costs (but not only):
Summary:
- Cost — 87.200 EUR
- Profit — 0
- Attendees — 700
- Days — 2
- Speakers — 20
Expenses:
- Staff — 0 EUR (15 volunteers are working to bring to life an event that once was just a dream)
- Speakers (flight tickets, accommodation, trip, gift bags) — 22.5K EUR
- Venue + food & drinks (3 coffee breaks/day + 1 lunch/day for every attendee) — 43K EUR
- Foto-video services — 2.5K EUR
- Swag (stickers, badges), Promotional stuff (roll-up) — 3K EUR
- Promotional campaigns — 1K EUR
- Accounting services — 800 EUR
- Fees (Ti.to, PayPal, Bank) — 1.5K EUR
- Discounts for other communities, free Diversity tickets, offering benefits for sponsors — 4K EUR
- 10% Margin (for unpredicted expenses) — 9K EUR
How do we plan to pay for all these things?
- Tickets — after estimating the costs, we calculate the tickets price so as to cover the conference price but to keep our non-profit scope. We assumed that we have 580 tickets sold: 200 Early bird tickets * 99 EUR, 50 Reasonable bird tickets * 139 EUR, 150 Late Bird tickets * 139 EUR , 150 Regular tickets * 169 EUR — Total: 70K EUR
- Sponsors — whose only interest is to help the community grow by paying a fee for a special sponsorship package, recruitment-free, with only a few benefits as our purpose is not to get any kind of profit out of this but to get some help to organize a great event) * 2.000 EUR/sponsorship package
- Extra money left from the previous edition — 10K EUR
Due to a good management of last year’s budget, this year we could start organizing the 2018’s edition with less stress regarding the money. Anyway, if this year’s budget will look as well as the one for the previous edition’s in the end, with the extra money we want to continue the plans we made for helping the growth of a connected global community as follows:
- Sponsor some brilliant kids to attend some not-so-accessible learning events
- Support the open source industry by donating money (eg: for projects like Open Collective’s Babel or Preact)
- Invite further JS experts to the Cluj JavaScripters Meetups
- Travel to speak about the JavaScript community in Cluj, to other geographic areas (that’s good for business, for all companies).
They say “no plan goes according to the plan” but we’ll let you know how this one went after the conference, so keep an eye on our social media activity. Or, if you are curious to find out more details than we can include in a blog post, don’t be shy, drop us a line anytime, we’d be happy to answer.
