2014 Lessons Learned

Code4Lib 2014 Conference Planning -- Lessons Learned

"Venue planning and negotiation"

A conference services planning organization, like CONCENTRA, has significant experience in contract details that volunteer planners would unlikely have.
Venue negotiation takes a significant amount of time. Total of nearly four (5) months of visits, informational calls, and negotiations.

"Sponsorships"

46.8% of the estimated cost of C4L2014 was provided by sponsorships. The registration cost of $165 per person covered another 46.8%. The remaining balance of C4L2013 covered the remaining 6-7%.
To keep registration costs low, it is critical the Sponsorship Committee raise a minimum of $50,000 per year.
The Code4Lib2014 Sponsorship Prospectus was a significant tool in raising money this year.

T-shirts

Getting sizing that works for everyone is hard.
There may be some design fatigue in the community.
Consider some other type of swag that doesn't involve sizing difficulties -- like re-usable coffee mugs (then attendees could use them all conference!)

Food and Beverage

Pre-Conferences

Consider a winnowing process for pre-conferences to limit them in advance of registration to the number of rooms that you have. Could either do advance voting like with talks, or say that you have x number of rooms and take the top x pre-conferences, etc. We set a 5-person registration minimum for A/V support this year, and found that all the pre-conferences met that limit (all 19 of them!) so it was not particularly useful.
Ask ahead of time to find out if pre-conf organizers are planning to open their pre-confs to non-conference attendees.

A/V

When talking to sales folks, get the REAL numbers on how many attendees will fit in a space (this means WITH A/V included, which could be 15% less or more than advertised capacities).

Organizing Volunteers

It's helpful to have a local representative on all volunteer committees to help grease the wheels.