On December 5th and 6th, we hosted A Conference For Charity called "The Commit Your Code Conference," where 100% of all ticket sales would be donated to charity. I got the idea at the end of August and really started everything mid-September. So, in less than 3 months, we put on this conference that was trending worldwide!
Important stats and cliff notes.
- We had over 60 speakers
- Ticket sales are 100% donated to charity.
- 77% of attendees worked in tech
- 40% of attendees have NEVER been to a tech conference ever before.
- We raised $10,197.70 for charity
- Our total sponsorship money equaled $11,500
Group photo of all the speakers
Running a conference for the sake of money never interested me and I do not knock anyone else for doing it. For-profit conferences are great! I absolutely support them! For me, it just didn't get me excited. The idea that I became really hooked on in August was to create a conference where income or location was not a barrier to resources. So for us, the tickets start at $30, and your food will be covered for both days of the conference. The only difference between a $30 ticket and a $100 ticket was how much we donated to charity. Your experience would NOT CHANGE or be different by how much money you gave.
I promised to publish all financial data publicly at the beginning of advertising this conference. Transparency is the biggest factor here, and I want nothing hidden. Here is a full breakdown of everything.
We raised $10,167.70 + $30, which was given at the end of the conference in cash, for a total of $10,197.70. We sold the tickets using a tool called Checkout Page, and it worked really well. Every penny will be donated.
In sponsorship money, we collected $11,500 from 8 sponsors.
Huge kudos to them because each sponsor had to make a VERY special exception to donate. One of the things I found out is that a large majority of organizations I approached plan their conference sponsorship budgets a year in advance. I thought 3 months was too long, but I quickly learned how wrong I was.
I also learned that the word charity scared off A TON of potential sponsors. This was actually one of the hardest pills to swallow, but it completely shifted my thinking as we are planning to Commit Your Code 2025. The word charity will not be in the title of the conference. It will be all over the advertising and website as we will do the same thing, donating everything to charity, BUT we will not put that on the prospectus when presenting it to businesses. It made them back away from the conversations. I am not happy that this resulted in that, but I will make sure I play the game that works to help us going forward. This way, it limits their liability and helps the community.
So we had $11,500, what did we spend it on?
Food
we spent a total of $7,387.73. This was the biggest cost for everything and we had to be very creative with it because it wasn't much as far as dollars go by. With 88.9% of feedback survey respondents rating the food at the event as a 7/10 or higher (as of the time of writing this), I am pretty happy with what we were able to do. Especially with people recording, taking pictures and praising it on socials, I feel like it was a win for what it was.
So here is the total breakdown of the food.
- 950.46 was spent at Costco. This was for a pallet of water, pastries, chips, sweets, plates, utensils, napkins, etc.
- 956.24 was spent just on panera bread coffee. It is a developer conference, you have to spend it for those that need it.
- 66.31 at Walmart to get aluminum trays
- 1,337.14 for two days of pizza. That is 54 pizzas each day.
- 1,128.07 for two days of Taco Bell. Roughly 260 tacos per day including Vegan tacos for the people that said vegan on their ticket to ensure we did not leave them out.
- 800.01 for two days of KFC.
- 2,175.82 for a speaker happy hour that also had tacos. We had to do something to honor the speakers for being there and just coming through for the community. We didn't have a lot of cash and with over 60 speakers, I think this was effective.
- Extra mention, we did a full conference social at the end of Day 1 but one of our sponsors paid it directly so I did not add this into the sponsorship money or food cost but if I did, that was another $2,000.
Badges
We spent a total of $1,003.95 on badges for attendees and volunteers. I originally planned to spend less until I had a conversation with another conference organizer, Vincent Myers, who said "For many attendees, this may be the only badge they ever get, or one of few. They appreciate their badges. So I don't skimp out on them because it means a lot to people." Really glad I took his advice. Many compliments were received because of the badges.
Camera and equipment rental
We spent $220.83. We rented a camera for the third track so we could stream it online. I brought my camera to stream track one, and the incredible Tracy Lee brought a camera we used to stream the second track.
Processing fees
This was $678.56. This is for processing invoices and the associated transactions for ticket sales, as well as card transaction costs. For those that may be unaware, any time you use your card, there is a fee the business has to pay which is generally a percentage as well as a transaction fee. Now we are counting the processing fees for tickets under sponsorship money so we can ensure 100% of the ticket sale goes to charity and not the ticket sale minus processing fees! This was a big deal to me. I wanted every penny to go direct to charity.
Photographer
The cost was $1,500. We had a photographer give out free headshots to attendees and since this was for charity, they gave us an amazing deal. Many of the conference attendees updating their LinkedIns with the photo on the same day! I think this was a huge value add for folks there.
Printing and Misc
This was 511.97, We had to print signs, get some buffet wire racks, sternos, Streamyard, cam links, etc. Small stuff, but it was essential.
This leaves us with under $200 left over, which we will need to use to file taxes and probably need to add a couple hundred in with it.
Where we saved money?
- Food cost was the biggest savings because we didn't use a caterer. The quotes we got were almost $10,000 higher! That alone helped us save a lot of money.
- Venue! We have been hosting meetups here for a couple years now and the venue loved the mission so much that they gave us the space for free for both days. When we were looking at conference centers attached to colleges we were receiving quotes for $5000- $7000 per day. So this really helped us out!
- The entire team donating their time. We didn't do this to make money. Everyone involved volunteered and this eliminated any costs with labor so we could make sure all the cash went to charity!
Results
The result was having an amazing conference experience for people that was so popular that the internet was buzzing about it. That people in the building felt true value for time. Where new friends were made and new partnerships were formed.
Going into it, we were pretty deadset on only doing it one time. Just a fun thing to do to bring the community together. THE ATTENDEES AND SPEAKERS were the ones to really force us and create so much enthusiasm in us that we agreed to do it again. So much so, that when I announced it, the cheers were so loud that we set off the alarm system haha!
CYC 2025 will be back, and we are aiming for mid-November! With 20 speakers already locked in!
Now, I will be donating 5,098.85 to FreeCodeCamp and 5,098.85 to St. Jude Children's Hospital. I am awaiting instructions on donating it to them and limiting the fees they incur. It will probably be ACH or Wire Transfers, but I haven't received them yet as it is Sunday night. I am sure Monday Morning will be when we finally get it.
Current bank account totals.
Thank you everyone!
I am DThompsonDev on all social media platforms.
I am also a Director Of Technology at This Dot Labs and a podcast host on "Modern Web Podcast" and "The Programming Podcast"
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/dthompsondev/
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Top comments (7)
The fact that you put this together so quickly and had all this thought into it is mind blowing. Speaks to your heart Danny and your willingness to help others. The transparency is something I hope others would catch on with to at least show people why things are what they cost. For the for profit conferences the breakdowns would help others like myself (Iām cheap) understand where all the money goes. Hope to make to CYC 2025 because everyone praised this event so far and I have severe FOMO.
We would be honored to have you there with us! Seriously! Hope I get to meet you in 2025! Let me know if there is anything I can do to help you be in the room with us!
Congrats, I'm glad you pulled it off. I used to organize php|tek back in the day and tons of meetups so always appreciate when people jump in. Three things..
First, what did you learn? What surprised you? What went totally (un)like you expected?
Second, are you going to try it again? If so, what are you going to do the same/differently?
Finally, despite being in this space outside Austin, this didn't hit my radar until a week in advance. What did your marketing plan look like? Did it work out like you expected?
Great questions!
1- Learned A TON. Some of it I shared, like removing the word Charity from the title. Learned better ways to make sponsor booths actually worth it for the sponsors. We placed the headshot station at the end of the sponsor booths so guess what? There was an entire line of people waiting for headshots. Guess what that led to? People engaging with the sponsors at the booths and they really liked that.
Yes. I was super undecided about doing it again until 2 very specific conversations. the first one, we had a speaker fly all the way to the conference from GHANA! I had no idea until we spoke. it took him 2 days to get there on flights and he paid his own way to get there since we didn't have budget to cover travel. As we spoke I asked him "Do you feel like this was actually worth your time?" and he said with a very serious face "I would buy the tickets again just so I could be here." The second, after Chris DeMars gave his talk (which was amazing) one of his attendees came up to me and said "This was the most valuable experience I ever had! please do this again!" How can I say no to that? I had people asking us and telling us to do it again and I definitely felt they enjoyed it but those two conversations truly stuck out to me.
Marketing plan was solid but there was a few things that went weird because of things not marketing related. The venue originally gave us space only for 500 people. So once we started getting tickets into the 340s we slowed down because we thought we were going to hit capacity. 2 days before the event they "surprised" us with 2 extra rooms. If we knew that, we would have advertised more. But the turn out was solid. The stream views were really good as well. Just all around happy with how it went. Truthfully, it actually worked out way better than expected. Especially with how we were trending globally during the conference, that had NOTHING to do with us. That had everything to do with the attendees sharing it nonstop. So much so that people at AWS Re:invent were DMing me saying "I am here at re:invent but my entire feed is filled with Commit your Code and now I have FOMO!" lol.
I would change quite a bit in the future, one being the date of the conference. So Commit Your Code 2025 will be in November instead of December.
I am glad I stayed off X / twitter for those days, the FOMO would have been too much for my cold dark heart to take.
Great work bud, hopefully one day I will have the funds to make it over to "CYCC" in the future :-)
This is so cool. Love it, especially the transparency! Also very nice of the venue to sponsor it:)
As both a speaker and attendee let me just say that Danny hit a Home Run!! The conference was well run, organized and SO MUCH FUN!!!