JSHeroes 2018 Transparency Report — Part 2 (follow-up)

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 had a day full of workshops and two conference days, with the help of 29 international and local JavaScript experts and there were 600 attendees.

The event took place at Grand Hotel Italia, in Cluj-Napoca, and it was organized by the JSHeroes Community (ex 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.

As promised, we came back with some updates regarding the conference’s budget, something we were more prepared this year for than at the first edition. The budget for the workshops is a separate affair, as a much smaller amount of money was needed to organize them, thanks to the speakers who supported our initiative. It was calculated as to cover all the costs for the participants and the profit will be redirected to educational initiatives (according to the detailed plan at the end of the article).

In our first article we presented the estimates so we can all make an idea of what organizing a conference means in terms of costs (but not only). As the event is over and we’re done with all the payments and operational stuff, we’ve updated them and we got to some conclusions that we hope to be useful for other communities organizing a conference:

Summary:

• Cost — 64.800 EUR
• Profit — 14.600 EUR
• Attendees — 600
• Days — 2
• Speakers — 29

Expenses:

• Staff — 0 EUR (15 volunteers worked hard to build this awesome event)
• Speakers (flight tickets, accommodation, trip, gift bags) — 17.800 EUR
• Venue + food & drinks (3 coffee breaks/day + 1 lunch/day for every attendee) — 31.8 K EUR
• Foto-video services — 2.1K EUR
• Swag (stickers, badges), Promotional stuff (roll-up) — 5.5K EUR
• Barista, Photo Booth, Decorations (banners, lights)- 2.9 K EUR
• Party — 300 EUR
• Sketching the talks — 1.5K EUR
• Promotional campaigns — 500 EUR
• Accounting services — 800 EUR
• Fees (Ti.to, PayPal, Bank) — 1.6K EUR

How did we plan to pay for all these things?

• Tickets — after estimating the costs, we’ve calculated the tickets price so as to cover the conference price but to keep our non-profit scope. We planned to have 580 tickets sold: 200 Early bird tickets * 99 EUR, 50 Reasonable bird tickets * 139 EUR, 150 Late Bird tickets * 119 EUR , 150 Regular tickets * 169 EUR — Total: 70K EUR

We sold 492 tickets and raised 59.700 EUR and because many of them were bought when the prices increased, the amount of money raised permitted us to also offer free tickets for people who proved their community spirit (eg: in our Blood donation campaign, for Diversity tickets etc.).

• 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

We kept the same sponsorship package as the year before and hoped companies will join us. And they did. There were 10 companies sponsoring us, some of them for the 2nd time in less than a year, both from Romania and from abroad, so we are very thankful to: Evozon, Fortech, Catalysts, Telenav, Yonder, Imprezzio Global, Mozilla, UMT Software, Moqups and to Builder X who have gave us 1700 EUR. With their help we managed to raise 19.700 EUR.

There are also many companies that sponsored our conference by paying for some of the travel & accommodation expenses of some of our guests: Google, Microsoft, Contentful, YLD, twilio, Nielsen Marketing Cloud, NPM, Netlify, Mapbox, many thanks go to them too.

We couldn’t make it without our partners either (RMB Mercedes Benz, Algida, Dalin, Acqua Carpatica), because there were some services we either didn’t estimate we would need or we planned to manage by ourselves but things couldn’t have been done without their help and without expenses. We’ve received help on the transportation side (for getting speakers from and to the airport, for visiting companies to sign contracts & invoices), decorations (the chairs in the hallway were offered by a Dalin) and we’ve been offered ice-cream and water to cool down during April’s (unexpected) hot days.

• Extra money left from the previous edition — 10K EUR

The money left from the previous edition contributed a lot in removing the worries we had when starting to organize the second edition, as we were able to pay in advance for different services. This year’s budget looks better than planned, so besides the money we’re keeping to jump start 2019’s edition we are going to use the extra money to continue the plans we made for helping the growth of a connected global community:

• Sponsor some brilliant kids to attend some not-so-accessible learning events
• Organize free events for people who are at the beginning of their careers (eg: Nodeschool workshops)
• Support the open source industry by donating money for projects from Open Collective. We’ve already set a monthly payment of 200$ for Codesandbox and we’re planning to support other initiatives too
• Invite further JS experts to the JSHeroes Community’s Meetups
• Travel to speak about the JavaScript community in Cluj, to other geographic areas (that’s good for business, for all companies).

We hope you’ve enjoyed the conference and will join us in 2019, as Blind Birds are already expecting you here.