JSHeroes 2019 Transparency Report — Part 2 (follow-up)

In 2 years, JSHeroes became one of the biggest dev conferences in South-East Europe and is one of the most popular tech events in Romania. For this year we’ve prepared a more ambitious plan than for the past editions. We had a Festival week, with more activities besides the day full of Workshops and two Conference days, with the help of more than 20 international and local JavaScript experts and there were expecting more than 700 attendees.

The event took place at Grand Hotel Italia, in Cluj-Napoca, and it was organized by JSHeroes Community, 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 2 editions. 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. The conference budget 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 — 92.650 EUR
• Profit — 14.600 EUR
• Attendees — 700
• Days — 2
• Speakers — 23

Expenses:

• Staff — 0 EUR (20 volunteers are working to bring to life an event that once was just a dream)
• Speakers (flight tickets, accommodation, trip, gift bags) — 33.3 K EUR
• Venue + food & drinks (3 coffee breaks/day + 1 lunch/day for every attendee) — 37.4K EUR
• Photo-video services — 2.8K EUR
• Swag (stickers, badges), Promotional stuff (giveaways) — 4K EUR
• Promotional campaigns — 900 EUR
• Accounting services — 1.5K EUR
• Other services that cannot be covered by volunteers (e.g.: design, sketching during the conference) — 4.7K
• Tools subscriptions (CFP, hosting) — 750 EUR
• Venue services & design (Stage design — LED TVs, lights, Barista, Photobooth) — 4.8K
• Fees (Ti.to, PayPal, Bank) — 1.5K EUR
• Discounts for other communities, free Diversity tickets, Blood campaign donation — 1K 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 600 tickets sold: 300 Early bird tickets * 99 EUR+VAT, 300 Regular tickets * 149 EUR + VAT — Total: 74K EUR

We sold 615 tickets and raised 80.300 EUR and because many of them were bought when the prices increased, the amount of money raised permits us to be better prepared for the following editions and be able to also support other open-source initiatives.

• 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 12 companies sponsoring us, both from Romania and from abroad, so we are very thankful to: Evozon, Fortech, Teleport, Catalysts, Telenav, Mozilla, Moqups, Arobs, MCRO, Metro Systems, Modus Create and to Accenture. With their help we managed to raise 24.000 EUR.

There are also some companies that sponsored our conference by paying for some of the travel & accommodation expenses of some of our guests: Mozilla, peerignon, many thanks go to them too.

• Extra money left from the previous edition — 15K EUR

The money left from the previous edition contributed a lot in removing the worries we had when starting to organize the third 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 2020’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:

• Donate money for education, especially for over-achieving kids
• Support the open source industry by donating money for projects from Open Collective (e.g.: CodeSandbox, ESLint)
• Organise the Node School event (2 events/year)
• 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).

We hope you’ve enjoyed the conference and will join us in 2020.