WordCamp:Las Vegas 2009 wrap-up

I knew it was going to take me a few days before I was ready to write this. But, the time has come. It’s time to say everything I have to say about organizing and running a WordCamp event.

Be warned, this post is going to be LONG and perhaps boring. I’m not writing it for you. I’m writing it for me as a road map so that when I set out to do this thing again next year, I’ll have something to look back on and perhaps avoid some of the pitfalls along the way.

First, let me say that I am very proud of how well WordCamp:Las Vegas turned out. I have never attended a WordCamp event before, so I had nothing to base my event on. At some point I was talking to somebody who said that “organizing a WordCamp allows you to put together a schedule that you would like to see at an event.” This couldn’t be more spot-on. I basically hand-picked the speakers I wanted to be there based on who I would have liked to have seen. It’s sorta like picking my own all-star team.

People have asked me 100 times if I picked that specific weekend because I knew CES/Affiliate Summit was going to be in town. The answer is, no, I didn’t. When I first found out that both of these shows were surrounding “my” weekend, I was a little bummed out. I thought it would be a bad thing. Wow, was I wrong. Because these other two events had already scheduled to bring out some of the big name speakers, I was able to borrow some of their time to have them speak at WordCamp. I seriously doubt Chris Brogan, Jim Kukral or Dave Taylor would have been flying out to Las Vegas on their dime to speak for free at a conference for 150 people. No way, no how!

Which brings up another point, local talent. Many of the previous WordCamp events have been heavy on local bloggers coming in to speak. The Vegas event had only one local speaker and the rest were in from out of town. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but given the list of big names we had on the agenda, I don’t see how it could have been bad.

OK, enough rambling, let’s break this down…

Set a Date
As I stated before, I got really lucky with my timing. Don’t leave it to luck. Do some research and see what else is going on. Not just in your area. Check the WordCamp website to see if there are other events happening the same day you’ve chosen. If so, pick a different day. But, if there is an event going on in your area that you could leverage in to some extra exposure or extra attendees, try to schedule it to fit in.

You should also decide early on if you are going to make it a one or two day event. In my head, I had always seen this event as two days, but I have no idea what made me think of it that way. I’m glad I chose two days, but it really did add an extra layer of complexity. If everything is on one day, there’s only so many things that can go wrong. If it’s two days, that’s twice as many chances.

Don’t forget, if you schedule well in advance you’ll have a better shot at getting a couple WordPress/Automattic staffers to attend/speak.

Enlist Help Early
This was my biggest mistake. I took on too much. But, honestly, I thought that more people would be interested in being involved with organizing the event. But, it just didn’t happen that way. I DO NOT suggest you try to organize an event on your own. Make sure that you have 2 or 3 people who are as passionate about the event as you are before you agree to it. Then, divide up the work. One person can work on finding a location while others can work on equipment, sponsors, speakers and advertising. Taking on this entire event by myself was just stupid. I’m really lucky to have pulled it all together and I don’t think I could do it again.

(FYI – I have already received about 10 offers from people to assist with next year’s planning. I think they were just waiting to see if this event was a total flop before adding their name to it. I’m half kidding here.)

Don’t forget you are also going to need help the day of the event. Plan on 2 or 3 people to work the registration desk the morning of the event. Somebody to shoot photographs, somebody to shoot video, sound, tech, somebody to check badges at the door, etc… I had a staff of 8 (including myself) and that seemed to be just about right for the size of my group.

Venue
Las Vegas has more conference space than any other city in the world, I believe. That does not mean that they give it away. A brand new casino 15 minutes from The Strip offered me a 50×50 room for $5,000 per day. I politely told them where they could stick their podium and kept looking. I wasn’t able to find a library, business or school/university (these were my first choices on where to host the event) that was willing or able to handle a group the size I had in mind, so I was forced to look at more traditional conference spaces. Nearly every casino has conference space, but one of the main issues is Union casinos. If they are a union casino, this means that bringing in my own equipment is a big pain. And, renting equipment from the casino is a HUGE cost. I was given the name and number of a lady at Palace Station by a friend who had recently ran his own conference at Palace Station. The cost of running the event at Palace Station was far and away better than anything I had been quoted to that point. It was so much better, when I was given the price over the phone I yelled out “Book it immediately!”

The event planning staff at Palace Station is fantastic. They were helpful, gave timely information, provided suggestions and were just flat-out easy to work with. I would happily work with them again in a heartbeat. (Thanks, Page! You Rock!)

One word of caution. Before you agree to guarantee a block of rooms to be sold, BE SURE you have a good understanding of how many people you will have coming and staying in the hotel. This had the potential to be a very costly expense as I overestimated the number of rooms that would be needed. Thankfully, things evened out at the end, but it would be better to reserve fewer rooms and let the people who book early benefit from the discount.

Registration
One of the previous WordCamp websites had used eventbrite.com to handle their registrations, so I followed suit. I couldn’t be happier. The money gets deposited directly in to your Paypal account. I have a Paypal debit card so I was able to use that to pay for expenses along the way. Plus, the eventbrite site has all sorts of features like tracking links and affiliate links that could help in having other people promote the event. Sadly, I didn’t find these features until it was too late to make use of them. But, I know where they are for next time.

DO NOT assume that you will get people to sign up for your event early. I opened registration in September. We had 146 pre-registered attendees. 80 of those signed up in the last 10 days. This is a bit of human nature at work, but it really is a pain in the ass for an event organizer. It’s impossible to know how much of anything you need to order. For example, I had capped the registrations at 200. So, I have to plan for 200 people showing up. When it came time to place an order for t-shirts, I ordered 2 dozen extra and my final shirt order was roughly 235. I am now left with roughly 65 shirts. That’s roughly a $300 expense that was unneeded.

One way to combat this issue would be to heavily discount the price of the tickets for people who sign up more than 4 weeks in advance. This will give you plenty of time to order shirts/printed material. As the event gets closer, raise the price. For walk-ups, the price should be even higher. This may go against the “keep it cheap” mentality of WordCamp, but when you are the one footing the bill for the event, you need to watch the bottom line.

Speakers
Finding people to speak at an event is a bit of work. First you need to find people willing to speak. Then, you need to figure out if the content they have to present is going to fit your agenda. Having 5 people come in and all talk about SEO would get really boring. Obviously you will want to have a mix of different types of speakers so that your event will appeal to a wider variety of attendees. Weather you decide to go for a “local” feel, or if you are able to attract speakers from all over the world, the trick is to get the word out. Start emailing potential speakers WAY in advance. The sooner the better. You want to get commitments from speakers early so you can leverage their help in promoting the event. One a speaker commits to your event, ask them to write a blog post or send twitter messages to help you promote the event. They don’t want to speak to an empty conference hall either.

You will of course want to contact the folks at WordPress to see if you can get a couple of WordPress/Automattic staffers to come speak. I was lucky enough to get Matt Mullenweg out to our event along with programmer Joseph Scott. Again, the trick is to ask early to give them plenty of time to schedule it.

If your speakers are going to use a slide presentation, require them to email them to you at least 48 hours in advance. This sounds easy, but many of the speakers write their speech the night before the event. Guys like Jim Kukral perform best under that last minute pressure. But, if you can get all the slide decks on to one computer before the event, you won’t run in to the delays that we had between each speaker. Also, if people are going to be using PowerPoint, BUY POWERPOINT. I mistakenly thought that I would be able to get away with using OpenOffice.org PowerPoint equivalent. While it is just fine if you create the presentation in OpenOffice, trying to import PowerPoint presentations sucked. They looked like crap and we had to end up using a different laptop. This caused even more headaches along the way.

One thing that I didn’t do, but will definitely do next time, is set a price for for speakers who want to come in to speak about a product. This year I had 4 or 5 product related sessions. I let each one of them come in because I felt that they had something to offer to bloggers in attendance. I felt that even if the specific app wasn’t exactly what they might be looking for, it could set off ideas for them that would benefit them down the line. That said, next year there will be a set cost to come in to do a product demo.

Agenda
It’s not always up to you as to when people are going to speak. I had 3 speakers who all requested to speak on Saturday because of scheduling conflicts on Sunday. Still, try to space out the “big names”. Plus, leave some time to let attendees have access to the speakers. The networking portion of the event is critical. Had to do over again, I’d have scheduled more time for networking.

It has been suggested to me to schedule a morning and afternoon break, along with lunch. I think this is a good idea and something I’ll keep in mind for next time. I’m thinking something along the lines of keynote/opening speaker, then a break and then a few sessions before it’s time for lunch. Same basic schedule after lunch.

If possible, schedule activities unrelated to the event. This is something I missed out on and am very sad about. I would have loved to schedule a photo-walk for the Las Vegas Strip for the night before the event. As it turns out I was extraordinarily busy the night before the event, but that doesn’t mean the other attendees couldn’t have gone out shooting. These events should be social. Do what you can to promote that aspect of it and make sure you have somebody else there to run the activity in case you are busy with preparations.

Schedule a staff dinner and include the speakers. This can be done the night before or the night of the event. But again, make it social. As the organizer of the event, I ran around all day during the event making sure things were where they needed to be. This kept me from sitting in on sessions and from speaking to some people who I would have liked to have spent more time with. A staff/speaker dinner would have been a great time to get to know everybody a little bit.

Sponsors
Several people asked me how I got the sponsors to donate money or products to give away. It’s simple really, I asked. I asked a lot. Then, I asked some more. Guess what, a lot of people told me no. The economy sucks so people were watching their budgets. You have got to be ready to hear the word no. Don’t take it personally, just move on.

Try to find local businesses who can donate. Try to find online companies that have synergies with WordPress or bloggers in general. Hosting facilities, designers, plugin developers, etc… Let them know what you are doing and then make it inexpensive for them to donate. Sure, finding one company to throw $5,000 would be nice, but you are far more likely to have somebody agree to a $200 donation. Don’t discount what you are giving them in return. Our site got a fair bit of traffic and there were several other blogs that linked back to the site. These donations have the ability to drive some decent traffic back to the sponsor’s website over time. I’ll personally be leaving the WordCamp:Las Vegas website in tact until it’s time to start planning next years. My sponsors are getting 8-10 months of advertising for their minor contribution. Remind them of that when you are asking for a donation.

Make it easy for them to donate. Have them send payment via paypal. Again, this makes it easy to pay for expenses via a paypal debit card.

One other way to help sponsor the event would be through affiliate links on your WordCamp website. This isn’t something I chose to do, but it could be an option. I’m just throwing it out there…

Costs
So, what does it cost to run a WordCamp. I’ll bet you get a different response from everybody you ask.

Today on Twitter I saw somebody say that WordCamp was sponsored by WordPress. This is very much untrue. Sure, they help promote the event through blog posts, the WordCamp.org website and some goodies to give away, but they do not provide a single dollar of support. I have no problem with this, I’m just clearing it up so you don’t think it’s as easy as saying, “I want to organize a WordCamp event” and all of a sudden money comes falling out of the WordPress tree. You organize it, you pay for it.

My out of pocket costs to run WordCamp:Las Vegas was roughly $4,500. I then received sponsorship money and registration money that evened it all out. I am quite lucky in that I was able to cover the entire cost of the event.

It’s funny, as I went along, more and more things kept coming up to spend money on. I STRONGLY suggest you put together an Excel spreadsheet and keep track of everything you spend money on. You will be surprised how quickly it adds up.

Here’s a list along with links to vendors I used (where appropriate):

• Conference Room
• T-shirts for attendees Jimmy’s Jam T-Shirts
• Lanyards/Badge holders nametag.com
• Badges and podium sign Vertical Printing
• Banner 24hbanner.com
• Food/drinks (if you plan to provide it)
• Business Permit (required for Las Vegas. Be sure to check.)
• WiFi
• Power outlets and extension cords
• Office supplies (pens, markers, clip boards, paper for hand-outs, etc, etc)
• Projector & Screen
• Adapters for laptop -> projector connections
• Wireless microphones / speakers (or PA system)
• Tips (It’s Vegas, we tip everybody)

The companies that I linked to above all did a great job for me. I wouldn’t have linked to them if they didn’t. If you decide to use them for your event, please tell them that you found them through us. Perhaps we can build a relationship and we can all benefit on some group pricing down the line.

Promotion
Getting the word out for an event like this isn’t as easy as you might think. It takes work. And a lot of word of mouth. But, here are a few things you should do:

• Create a dedicated site for the event (example: lasvegaswordcamp.com
• Email EVERYBODY in your address book and ask that they tell everybody they know
• Send a message on every social media site you are a part of (myspace, facebook, etc…)
• List your event on upcoming.yahoo.com
• Contact Lorelle as she’s the queen of WordCamp promotion
• Blog about the event on your site every week or so
• On the dedicated site, write a blog post for every event that happens during planning (confirmed speaker/sponsor and things like that)
• Try to get your local media to do a story about it
• Ask each of the speakers to blog and tweet about it
• Ask attendees to blog/tweet about it
• Ask sponsors to blog/tweet about it
• Hang a flier in coffee houses or wherever will let you

You can not talk about the event enough. The more people you tell about it, the better your chances of getting people to register.

Well, I think that about covers it. Hopefully this will help you create your own WordCamp in your area. If there is an area that you want me to elaborate on, please leave a comment and I’ll follow-up.

See you at WordCamp:Las Vegas 2010!