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By megansanicki on
DrupalCon Europe plays an important role in moving Drupal forward by uniting community members across countries for knowledge sharing, networking, and celebrating. Plus, the event is one of the largest events focused on contribution back to the project. However, with waning attendance and financial losses, it’s time to find a new path forward so it is financially sustainable and provides value to the European community. This blog covers the financial problem we need to solve and it is part of a series that includes:
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The problem we need to solve for financial sustainability
The Financial Problem:
DrupalCon is a human experience. We certainly want to focus on the people in the community: what they want to achieve and what that looks like through an improved experience. However, financially the event needs to at least break even for us to continue providing this special experience. That is why we are starting this conversation by framing DrupalCon Europe’s financial problems.
We know that financially-focused blogs can be downright boring and not everyone feels comfortable reading financial statements. So this post provides several kinds of reports to illustrate the problem and we do our best to spell out where the challenges lay. Feel free to leave questions in the comments and we will answer them.
Last year, the Drupal Association contracted with a new financial planner, Summit CPA. They provide a lot more resources and financial insight than we have had in the past. One of the biggest things we learned last September was that DrupalCon Europe loses money. In the past, we did not include staff costs as part of the event cost, so we operated under the understanding that DrupalCon Europe was breaking even at a minimum. Our DrupalCon team spends 50% of their time on this event. Marketing spends close to 50%, the sponsor sales team spends 30%, engineering spends about 15%, and finance spends about 20%. For DrupalCon Europe, the staff costs add up to $220,000 per event.
It wasn’t wrong to not include staff costs in the DrupalCon budget. It just didn’t give the true picture of how this particular program was performing. As we started our financial turnaround last year, we realized that we need each of our programs to be self-sustaining going forward. Except, DrupalCon Europe is not self-sustaining. That puts pressure on the viability of other programs like Drupal.org, which needs to be properly funded to support everyone in the community.
Understanding Financials Through Comparison
One of the best ways to understand a situation is through comparison, so let’s look at DrupalCon Europe versus DrupalCon North America, which consistently operates at a profit due to several factors. We provide several reports below to help you see the comparison and the post walks you through those comparisons.
You will notice that all financials are in U.S dollars (USD). Since the European community works with different currencies, we felt it was less confusing and less prone to error if we kept our reports in USD.
DrupalCon Reports
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Demographics: DrupalCon Baltimore Wrap vs DrupalCon Dublin Wrap, DrupalCon Barcelona Wrap
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Profit & Loss: DrupalCon Baltimore vs DrupalCon Dublin
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Ticket Cost Break Down: DrupalCon Baltimore vs DrupalCon Dublin
DrupalCon North America has a net income percentage of up to 38% and makes up 45% of Drupal Association’s annual revenue. Meanwhile, DrupalCon Europe operates at a loss. For example, DrupalCon Dublin lost $176,000 and had a net income percentage of -18%. DrupalCon Vienna is forecasted to lose over $200,000 even with the programming reductions that we made earlier in the year.
DrupalCon Europe Financial Challenges
In short, DrupalCon Europe income is lower than DrupalCon North America due to fewer attendees and less sponsor support. However, expense per attendee is higher in Europe. Below is a summary of the main differences that make DrupalCon Europe unsustainable. We invite you to review the Profit & Loss statements and other financial reports so you can have more clarity around these points and possibly find ones we missed.
Greater Expenses than DrupalCon North America
One of the biggest cost difference is related to the convention center. Both DrupalCon Europe and North America are held in this kind of venue due to the attendance size. While DrupalCon Europe has less attendees than the North American event, it is still large enough to require us to be in a convention center.
We looked at moving the event to a hotel, but wifi and catering costs make this option more expensive. Also, hotel-based conferences require a large room block reservation that the Drupal Association would have to financially guarantee, which is a big risk. The European event attendees tend to opt for other lodging options like AirBnB. It’s unlikely we can sell enough hotel rooms to meet the guarantee and will end up paying a large penalty.
By comparing DrupalCon Dublin expenses with DrupalCon Baltimore expenses, you can see that the expense 5710: Facility and Furnishing is $328,000 in Dublin and $129,000 for Baltimore. This is the main expense putting strain on DrupalCon Europe’s sustainability.
It’s also more expensive to send staff and our contracted production team from the United States to Europe for a marathon of an event (up to 10 days).
Less Financial Support than DrupalCon North America
The challenge of funding an expensive, professional event like DrupalCon Europe comes down to two things: smaller attendance and less sponsor support. Here is a breakdown of how these two revenue items differ from DrupalCon North America.
Attendees
Smaller attendance with higher expenses make the event unsustainable. DrupalCon Europe attracts about 1,700 - 1,800 attendees compared to DrupalCon North America, which has over 3,000 attendees. This means there is less ticket revenue to cover costs. And DrupalCon Europe attendance is decreasing each year by about 14% a year on average (if you average in Vienna's forecasted attendance), making it harder to cover costs in the future.
Another attendee difference is that DrupalCon North America attracts end users who are either leveling up their skills or evaluating Drupal or looking for a service provider. Having end users at DrupalCon attracts Drupal shop / digital agency sponsors who get new business by connecting from this audience. Meanwhile, DrupalCon Europe primarily attracts builders (developers, project managers, designers) from Drupal shops / digital agencies. There are very few end users attending DrupalCon Europe. This impacts sponsor revenue as many Drupal shops / digital agencies do not want to sponsor an event where they are much less likely to get a business opportunity.
Sponsors
DrupalCon North America has about $850,000 in sponsor revenue while DrupalCon Europe has $300,000. There are a few reasons for this difference.
A big portion of DrupalCon North America’s sponsor revenue comes from North American Drupal shops / digital agencies. As mentioned, they sponsor because they can connect with the end user attendees who give them business opportunities. They also sponsor because the event is held in a country where they conduct business.
In Europe, and as mentioned above, Drupal shops / digital agencies are much less likely to get a qualified lead because it is primarily a developer event. Additionally, the Drupal shops / digital agencies in Europe support sales in their specific countries. As DrupalCon Europe moves around, sponsors find that the event is in a country where they don’t do business and therefore don’t want to sponsor.
As for the shops/ agencies who do sponsor, they do so to support the community. It’s simply getting harder for them to invest in the event as they chose to put those funds into marketing or operations. It is important to note that hosting and software companies do find value in supporting DrupalCon since they target the developer audience.
A Study of Ticket Sales Profitability
Another way to see how the income and expense challenges make DrupalCon Europe unsustainable is to look at what the sale of a ticket covers and how much is left over to go towards paying expenses.
Here is a report that shows profitability of the early bird and the regular rate ticket for DrupalCon Dublin and DrupalCon Baltimore. It shows that the profitability is:
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DrupalCon Dublin Early Bird Rate |
DrupalCon Baltimore Early Bird Rate |
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Ticket Profitability before sponsor income |
-$238.05 |
-$0.36 |
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Sponsor income per attendee |
$188.86 |
$244.15 |
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Total Ticket Profitability |
-$49.19 |
$243.79 |
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DrupalCon Dublin Regular Rate |
DrupalCon Baltimore Regular Rate |
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|
Ticket Profitability before sponsor income |
-$133.87 |
$170.39 |
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Sponsor income per attendee |
$188.86 |
$244.15 |
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Total Ticket Profitability |
$54.99 |
$343.79 |
As you can see, we lose money for each DrupalCon Europe early bird ticket we sell. You may ask, why would we ever price a ticket that loses money? It’s a good question. When we priced this we did not include staff costs in the overall event costs. We were operating under the understanding that the ticket was making money. We can see now that when we include the staff costs to the overall event costs, this ticket type loses money.
You can also see that not only does the Dublin regular rate earn $300 less profit per ticket compared to Baltimore, that profitability needs to compensate for the losses accrued by the Dublin early bird ticket sales.
Looking more closely at the report, you can also see that having less DrupalCon Europe sponsor support puts the ticket sales profitability at an even greater disadvantage.
Clearly, DrupalCon Europe has a financial structural issue to solve for.
Blockers to Financial Solutions
There are a few ways to solve the financial problem. Ticket prices could be increased, we could grow attendance to improve the profitability, we could stay in the same venue each year, or we could cap attendance and have a smaller DrupalCon to control costs. We looked at these options and found the following blockers to each solution.
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Increase ticket prices.
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We surveyed the European community and found that there was a strong resistance to increasing ticket prices even if more value was delivered. Many see this event as a community event that should be affordable or free. Many believe they pay through their code and non code contribution and don’t want to pay more in ticket costs. Many also told us they want the ticket price to be greatly reduced.
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Grow ticket sales revenue by expanding who the event serves
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Attract more “builders”. Both DrupalCon Europe and North America attract a “builder persona” who work at a digital agency or Drupal Shop (developer, project manager, designer, UX). However, North America attracts builders from end users as well whereas DrupalCon Europe does not. It has been challenging to grow the end user / builder attendee at DrupalCon Europe. Part of the challenge is that when an end user adopts Drupal, the Association does not know. There is no closed-loop system that tells the Drupal Association who is using the software. We have to rely on Drupal shops / digital agencies to provide this information or be our marketing channel. In Europe, several agencies said they don’t want their end user attending so they stay positioned as “the trusted source on how to Drupal”.
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Attract “evaluators”. In North America, the event has a commercial element, attracting decision makers who want to meet with sponsors and learn more about Drupal. This not only grows ticket sales, but it also encourages the high level of sponsor support in North America. However, DrupalCon Europe attendees strongly request that we don’t include a marketing or commercial focus at DrupalCon Europe, keeping it a purely developer event.
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Hold a smaller event to control costs.
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We researched this over the past few months. Looking at a 1,000 - 1,200 person event, venue options that can meet our event needs are still too expensive. And after testing the smaller event concept, we found that many community members were dissatisfied with this direction.
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For DrupalCon Vienna, we controlled costs by making the program smaller by reducing the Monday trainings and summits. We also eliminated other elements like the DrupalCon t-shirt. Despite these changes, we are still operating at a loss due to decreasing attendance. Many expressed they understood why we needed to make these changes, but were unhappy with them. We are grateful to the Drupal Austrian community for bridging this gap and hosting summits and trainings on the Monday before Drupalcon Vienna.
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Staff Capacity
This part is a bit sensitive because I’m talking about staff. They gave permission to have these details shared with you.
Last year, when the Drupal Association reduced its staff to bring our expenses in line with our revenue, we eliminated work to match the smaller team capacity. After living with that reality for a year, we can see that we did not do a good job with DrupalCon.
The DrupalCon staff consists of Rachel Friesen, Director of Events, and Amanda, Gonser, Program Manager. Rachel is an operational wizard, who is committed to excellence, and cares deeply about delivering a special experience that meets our community’s needs. Rachel has incredibly streamlined the way we produce DrupalCon from site selections, budgeting, space planning, vendor management, sponsor support, marketing oversight, and so much more. She moves an army of people ranging from the board, staff, vendors, sponsors, and community members through a process that ensures that everything gets done on time with the best possible planning. I am always impressed how Rachel goes the extra mile (er, kilometer), to hear and address everyone’s needs and ideas. It is truly a balancing act.
Many of you likely know Amanda from the DrupalCon emails or you are one of the hundreds of volunteers who work with her. Amanda is high energy, bubbly, focused, and moves hundreds of people through a process that allows everyone to contribute in their special way; track chairs who pick sessions, trainers, local volunteers who create the local experience, a troupe of event photographers, room monitors, social media volunteers, and more. As with all people management, Amanda not only gives volunteers a structure to follow, but she invests time with them to foster relationships. We can not produce DrupalCon without our amazing and generous volunteers and they deserve a meaningful experience.
While producing DrupalCon, many people want to try new things like add a new program to DrupalCon five months before the event or create a new sponsor package. There are certainly great ideas that can level up the experience. Unfortunately, Rachel and Amanda simply do not have the capacity to entertain many new ideas. That’s frustrating for both of them because they want community members to realize their ideas. It’s equally frustrating to the community members. In the end it can create a lose-lose situation.
Over the year, we noticed that Rachel’s and Amanda’s calendar is booked every hour throughout each day. When we talk, they have little time as they run from one meeting to the next. It’s a frenetic pace. We moved to Jira this year and their burndown charts show that they can not complete everything they need to do within a sprint. This pace and high levels of stress are causing health issues.
Amanda did a capacity study. It showed that she is scheduled to do over 69 weeks of work in a year (and that doesn’t include sick or vacation time). Just a reminder, a year has 52 weeks. Rachel is in a very similar situation. We looked at which work we could eliminate, but at this point there is nothing. Naturally, the situation is untenable and must be addressed immediately.
Given how small our team is, the only way to address this is by adding another staff member or contractor. This means expenses will further increase for DrupalCon Europe. We can go this route, but in the end what this tells me is that we do not have the right operational model to support two DrupalCon per year - let alone the ability to scale back up to three per year.
I want to pause and thank Rachel and Amanda for pushing through this challenging time. Please join me in thanking them. I also want to thank the other Drupal Association staff for going above and beyond to make DrupalCon a special experience. You support Rachel and Amanda in so many ways to deliver a great event for the Drupal community.
Additionally, it can not be said enough how special our volunteers are. They contribute their time and talent while already having full lives that include jobs, family, friends, and other interests. Volunteers could choose to do many other things with their free time, yet they chose to create DrupalCon for all of us. Thank you.
Summary
Phew! That was a longgg DrupalCon financial overview. Thanks for hanging in there. I hope sharing all that data and insight helps answer some of the questions we’ve seen in past blog comments and on Twitter this past year.
As you can see, solving DrupalCon Europe’s sustainability is critical, not only so this event can exist into the future, but so it doesn’t put strain on the sustainability of Drupal.org, which is clearly imperative for the project’s viability. We need to answer the question “how do we balance creating a valuable event with the financial realities of event production and the realities of staff capacity?”
But before we get into solutions, let’s look at what the community wants DrupalCon to achieve.
Our next blog in this series will be about the other problem to solve: How can DrupalCon Europe provide unique value?
Comments
Thank you for the transparency, and for all your hard work!
As a track chair in Portland and Austin, I haven't had the opportunity to meet any of the new staff in person. But I really appreciate you laying out the challenges here, and looking to the community for ideas.
I've only been privileged to attend one Drupalcon Europe (Amsterdam) but I was incredibly impressed at how well it was run.
I also want to thank you for surfacing the lack of sustainability in Amanda's and Rachel's jobs. We have a fantastic community, and we should figure out a way to support an Association that can be an equally fantastic and sustainable place to work.
In short, DrupalCon Europe
I'm not an economist but haven't you answered your own question? high price = less tickets sold = lower income.
you hit the spot
I do not know of any other reason, because we stopped participating (with a wet eye) when prices rose to the sky (ticket price and cities/hotels).
Cheaper tickets and overall profits
I wonder might a solution lie in decreasing the price for a ticket instead of thinking of raising the price. Pretty much everyone I know in the Drupal community in Europe thinks the price of a ticket for DC is very expensive (especially when we compare against smaller conferences like Frontend United (I know, lots of other variables so the comparison doesn't hold too much water)). Seems the price has been increasing year-on-year, but the attendance falling. Doing the same thing again and again but expecting different results, well ... you know the rest of the maxim.
If the price was reduced by, say, 15% the attendance might also grow by 30% (I'm making up these numbers). This higher attendance rate would probably mean more end users and evaluators. This, in turn, should then lead to more sponsors willing to step up if they are able to target builders and users.
Another thought - if we shift the focus from which DC makes a profit and towards the question "does DC in aggregate make a profit?" we might not have so much pain with the EU DC. If between them they bring in €2.5m and the total costs are €2m, then the DA is up €.5m and continues to allow a very important service to run in EU.
============
Drupal Core Maintainer for "Out of the Box" Initiative
Annertech - Web Agency of the Year.
What's the bottom line?
Agree with decreasing the ticket price to increase total revenue, but I still wonder if this is missing a more fundamental point. Though DrupalCon Europe may be independently insolvent, it may make contributions to the broader Drupal Ecosystem that makes such an event sustainable when these broader activities are considered (and may actually do so at a cheaper 'price' than alternatives). For example, DrupalCon might most cost-efficiently accelerate talent and development within the Drupal community. In this sense, DrupalCon is an 'investment', not a profit-making enterprise (again, going back to Econ 101, if you could truly turn a profit operating an event like this, a for-profit organization would step in to do so). While there should be a judicious look at finances, it's also imperative to consider any potential impacts that optimizing for profit might have on growing the community and contributions to Drupal as an entity beyond DrupalCon.
The money to run drupal.org
The money to run drupal.org has to come from somewhere. It comes chiefly from DrupalCon. While DrupalCons are also investments in the community, the point is that they should at the very least break even.
If we can't make money when there are ~1,500 Drupal people in one place, then we are doing something wrong.
It is possible to turn a profit on this event by raising the ticket price. Similar conferences cost much more than Drupal, but nobody wants to do this; we want it as accessible as possible. Even the very modest price rises in recent years have been controversial.
> If we can't make money when
> If we can't make money when there are ~1,500 Drupal people in one place, then we are doing something wrong.
It depends on the goal.
I don't know any FOSS developer conference that costs as much as DrupalCon.
If the issue is funding d.o and other projects (e.g. it would be interesting to see how many of us would pay for operating drupalcode.org), then these projects should have a pitch with documentation and reasoning. Then we can donate. I can imagine some company would provide services, e.g. CDN, anycasted DNS, etc. but it is hard to offer anything if the plans are as transparent as they are now.
Fosdem gets their venue for
Fosdem gets their venue for free from the university. That's very generous, and it's same reason that Drupalcamp London is so reasonable. Remember, the venue, which often includes a mandatory food budget for a commercial venue, is the largest single cost.
The prices I found for SymfonyCon were €289 rising to €379 after the earlybird period.
Dotgo... correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there's a single stream. That means there's only one space needed. And so it can happen in a theatre. Event venues are exponentially expensive depending on the size of the event, and by that I mean the number of attendees and the physical spaces required. An option to reduce the cost of DrupalCon would be to reduce the streams or limit the number of attendees.
Serverless 2 day conference ticket was £395. It's also only 2 tracks. And I think the number of people attending are in the hundreds, not the thousands.
And here's a counter example:
ApacheCon Europe 2016 Registration Fees:
Attendee Registration Fee: USD$499 through October 3, 2016, USD$749 through November 3, 2016, and USD$999 thereafter.
Committer Registration Fee: USD$275 through November 3, 2016, USD$375 thereafter.
Academic Registration Fee: USD$275 through November 3, 2016, USD$375 thereafter.
Our DrupalCon team spends 50%
Seems to me like these numbers are much to high for DC Europe. 50% of their time while DC Europe only attracts half as much visitors as DC North America?
How much time do they spend on the DC North America?
Price Sensitivity in differing Euro Countries
I will not be attending Drupalcon Vienna, the reasons are specific, as a freelancer I cannot justify the expense, Ticket Price plus Accommodation plus Travel from the UK to Vienna (plus beer and food money etc.) means very little change out of a £1000. I cannot justify that expense even though I am chomping at the bit to go.
But I have a grounding in Economics and have kept up my studies since graduating in Applied Economics. Your analysis above is missing some other very real differentiators between Europe and the USA.
The cost of living in European Countries varies wildly in ways that I feel is unlikely in the USA Whilst the UK is one of the most expensive countries to live and work in Europe, some Eastern European and Meditteranean countries have a much lower cost of living. A thousand Euros goes a lot further in say Romania or Portugal than it does in the UK.
A Romanian Developer I worked with last year in London saved every penny he could and returned to Romania with enough funds to last a year or so, despite only having worked in the UK for a year or so.
Consequently spending close to thousand Euros on a Drupalcon in Europe is unlikely to be justifiable to many Drupal People in some Countries. Equally the cost of living is so much higher in the UK for example that disposable income to spend on a Drupalcon are much more difficult to justify. So while you would expect the UK to have the highest number of attendees this is not necessarily going to be the case.
You seem to have left this out of your equation but I suspect that is a major factor for why there are less attendees at Drupalcon Europe.
I have no idea, sadly, for a solution to this conundrum.
Additional points
Let me add some points for your consideration.
A quick study, from someone who doesn't work in the respective fields, given data from wikipedia and common sense, in under 1h of research and writing.
Geographical / Demographics:
Geographical / Demographics vs Wealth:
From these quick statistics you can easily understand why there's double the attendees in DrupalCon North America comparing to DrupalCon Europe.
Now if this was the only big difference, the truth is, there are more things to consider:
Left out of big expensive events like this are the population of countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland, Romania, and many others in Europe. We are quite dependant on our companies to sponsor us, unless he manage to get high incomes ourselves.
So how can we attract more attendees to the DrupalCon Europe? Here's some suggestions:
More tips:
Bellow the numbers in detail, considering the income mentioned.
Europe:
Size (km2):
2586
41285
323802
70273
102775
42931
450295
41543
83879
338424
357168
30528
242495
640679
Total: 2,768,663
Population:
576249
8401120
5267146
4761865
332529
5748769
10053061
17116281
8794267
5506312
82175700
11250585
65648000
66991000
Total: 292,622,884
North America:
Size (km2):
3796742
9984670
1972550
Total: 15,753,962
Population:
323127513
35151728
119530753
Total: 477,809,994
Luís Pedro Algarvio
Site Reliability / DevOps Engineer.
Free and Open Source Software advocate.
Passionate about life and work.
lp.algarvio.org
What does the geographical
What does the geographical size have to do with anything? You seem to imply that that makes NA a better location, but if anything being more spread out is more costly for travel.
Europe staff & crew
Thank for putting this together Megan. Very useful and informative.
I don't know how significant this is, but the one part of the additional cost of a European DCon that must be either corrected or ignored is:
I see no justification for using a US-based production team - these resources are available in Europe. If you have an exclusive contractual obligation to use your US team globally, then the contract is bad and needs re-scoping.
I can see that certain DA staff may need to travel, but the choice to locate all DA staff in the US should not be used as an extra expense on events elsewhere. In this age of global connectivity it would seem perfectly reasonable to have some staff located elsewhere, such as Europe. Otherwise these travel costs need to be factored into the general DA budget as the cost of serving a global community from a centralised admin hub, not an expense on the regional event. Otherwise the decision to locate the DA in the US will always be an additional cost on the rest of the global community.
Thanks again for all of your hard work.
Andy
Changing the world one drop at a time...
Indeed DC Europe is not the EU operation of a US company
Thanks for pointing this out, I was scanning the comments hoping to see this because it was my first idea reading the report. All this reasoning is based on the assumption that the US-based location of the DA is just an axiom and staff-related costs are based on this. If we remember Drupal actually originated in the EU, there is a good case to be made that the DA would probably best located in a low-cost EU country (eastern / southern) rather the in the US or western / northern Europe. Not even mentioning the legal advice costs mentioned multiple times during the DA posts about this year's piece of community drama, which appear to be typical US-only (OK, mostly) preoccupations.
Totally agree. And not only
Totally agree. And not only are they bringing staff from NA, its from the west coast of NA! PDX is about as far away from Europe geographically as it gets and that probably should have been considered when setting up shop there. Anyone from the US knows its significantly cheaper to get to Europe from NY, Boston or DC than it is from Portland. At this point however it would behoove the DA to have a separate team in Europe for the event to reduce travel costs as that seems to be the main reason they cant break even
There's no doubt that travel
There's no doubt that travel is more expensive. But that's only one part of the story of pluses and minuses.
Thanks for the ideas
I must admit I miss living in NJ and having a 5 hour flight to London. I can say that wages on the east coast are not the same as wages in other parts of the US. But that doesn't really get to your point. I hear you when you say that there is "cheaper labor" in other parts of the world.
I can't speak to why Portland was chosen as the Drupal Association's location other than it is where you can find great talent that understands open source, which is an important criteria for hiring talent at an open source foundation. I do want to point out that we no longer have an office and we are fully distributed. Staff is in the US and one person has been generously donated to our team, who works from India.
I do think a new model will help us reduce costs for producing DrupalCon in Europe. Just in case there was a misunderstanding, the staff costs are not just travel to Europe, it is their time allocated to producing the event. That's the real staff cost. It takes many of us on staff to produce one Con. So, hiring more people out of Europe - who are on our payroll - to work on Con isn't the right model. That option pushes up costs. But, I think you are on to something in terms of finding solutions that are local to the region.
I am encouraged by people in the community already coming up with solutions that solve the sustainability challenge. I know that by working together, we will find a better path forward.
I hope you will join us in finding a solution, together. You can join the Community Summit in Vienna or you can join the Slack channel in DCEU-Future. If those two options don't work for you, I can find another way to connect you with those who are working on a solution.
Megan Sanicki
Executive Director
Drupal Association
twitter: megansanicki
Thanks for the ideas
Bonjour fgm. I always appreciate hearing from you. While I can't speak to the history about the Drupal Association being set up in Portland, I can say that you are right in that we need to find a better structure things so that ALL regions, starting with Europe, are better represented so their unique needs are met. And we need to do it in a sustainable way. There are several ways to achieve this. Would you like to meet at DrupalCon Vienna to talk about this? I look forward to hearing your ideas.
With gratitude,
Megan
Megan Sanicki
Executive Director
Drupal Association
twitter: megansanicki
Meeting in Vienna
Hi Megan. Yes it would indeed be a please to have a chat. I'm here with Brigitte, whom you probably remember from Paris, but who doesn't have a DrupalCon ticket, so we could meet outside the conference, monday to wednesday.
Let's meet!
Great. I'll email you and we can set up a time.
Megan Sanicki
Executive Director
Drupal Association
twitter: megansanicki
We'd love more end users at DC EU
First, I second what rootwork just said: thank you for all the hard work! I've been to several DC EU, and have had a great time every edition.
However, having worked for several Drupal shops in Switzerland, I feel many would want end users to come to DC EU, and specifically not have it be a developer-only event. This is the number one reason sponsorships were either low, or non-existent, for the companies I worked for. DC EU was seen as an opportunity for employees to learn more about Drupal and contribute to core, but if potential clients would have attended:
When (or how) was this data gathered? Does it truly represent the majority of EU-based Drupal shops?
I'm convinced that if DC EU would attract more clients, it would be more profitable. Let's not forget that attending DC EU is a huge financial sacrifice for many EU-based Drupal shops. If it would lead to more ROI, more people would attend, I'm sure of it.
I blog about Drupal right here
Thanks, Megan!
That couldn't have been the most enjoyable post to write, but I'm looking forward to part 2.
In Europe, several agencies
I find this part really disturbing, even as a general statement, and not just as it relates to DCEU. Perhaps this gatekeeping is a big part of the problem.
I think that comes from the
I think that comes from the fact that Drupal used to be exotic and rather big corps(clients) used instead of small to mid clients. But with D8 and smyfony and oop Drupal is not that exotic anymore and the advantages of the Drupal-isms knowledge lost their value so lot of companies that invested their time into gathering their knowledge and know-how basically already lost it and with more modules being ported to d8 there will be no advantage in the market for them so their involvement will decline.
This applies to devs as well. Many spent years learning and practising Drupal and enjoying profits from their know-how but as I've said, this no longer applies and salaries and demand is now gone since any PHP dev can now learn Drupal in a few days.
I too have been solely Drupal-dev for over 11 years and for the past year I started to see the lack of job opportunities as well. So why should a company invest in Drupal if they can just invest in Symfony or any other PHP cons? Not to mention the demand and push for SPA and decoupled architectures.
Exactly!
Exactly!
From my point of view, this is the first screw to adjust!
Isn't the fact that EU
Isn't the fact that EU literally costs 3x for the venue the problem? If the venue cost the same, you would at least break even. Is there an option to host in cheaper European countries? With the venue cost so high I don't see how you ever get the math to work reasonably.
There are options like Sofia,
There are options like Sofia, Bulgaria where the costs, in general, are 1/2 to 1/4 in comparison to other European countries http://bit.ly/2wIU5VW
Also, hotel, food and transport costs are quite low.
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If you check, the facility
If you check, the facility and furnishing was just $129K for Dublin. That is ~6% for the total cost, so the location doesn't seem to matter.
$129K For NA, $328k for
$129K For NA, $328k for Dublin. Check again...
True, my bad. Still, that is
True, my bad. Still, that is just 30% of the revenue.
Come over to Portugal.
Come over to Lisbon, Portugal.
The Web Summit is just another reason to come here anyways.
Luís Pedro Algarvio
Site Reliability / DevOps Engineer.
Free and Open Source Software advocate.
Passionate about life and work.
lp.algarvio.org
Would off season rates help?
As stated above, the rental cost of the space seems to be the biggest issue. Find a place with comparable rates to the US and you are at about breakeven. Is there seasonality involved in the pricing? Would off-season rates save enough to make a difference? I've been to conferences in the NE US in February when the weather is cold and miserable, but I'm sure the facilities were steeply discounted. It wasn't as much fun as New Orleans in May, but it was probably more productive!
Another factor what I don't think is considered in the above analysis is the opportunity cost of the staff spending so much time on a revenue negative effort. If they had spent that time on some other activity there might be $100K or more additional revenue available to the association above the baseline if we assume DrupalCon Europe doesn't happen.
Drupal communities
As I see there is no promotion for drupalcon on drupal community webistes. I quickly scanned the EU websites .hu .sk .cz .pl .be .de .dk etc and there is no visible sign that there will be a big Drupal event in Vienna.
I remember the time, when every Drupal dev had a badge on their website: "I am goning"..
This is really poor marketing. Displaying the DrupalCon banner must be forced on every local Drupal community. By the way, where is the official DrupalCon badge?
Sorry mate, but you expect a
Sorry mate, but you expect a lot for a $50K marketing budget…
We promoted DCon in several
We promoted DCon in several newsletters, which are received by every person registered on drupal.sk and drupal.cz
Afaik, you are Drupal.sk community member as well, all our sites are opensourced on GitHub, so there is no barrier for you to make pull request and add whatever promotion you find appropriate ;-)
Looking at the European issues
perhaps an option would be to have the Europe DrupalCon like a travelling roadshow over a period of 4 weeks. If you divide Europe into 4 geographical regions the following happens:
- The number of attendees reduces to about a quarter, so a smaller and cheaper venue would suffice
- It would cast a wider net of sponsors, there would be sponsors within each region and therefore more sponsorship money
- Some of the sessions (and keynotes) could be more specific / focused for that region, perhaps attracting more potential users/customers
- Reduced travel cost for attendees, making it perhaps more agreeable to pay higher ticket prices.
There are of course lots of other implications, like some of the presenters may need to travel and present multiple times. Smaller events are definitely more cost effective, for example the DrupalSouth events in Australia and New Zealand pretty much break even as far as I know.
The numbers make me sad.
The numbers make me sad.
These are the costs that look overpriced. Without knowing the actual line items, it is hard to stop people to have second thoughts.
All those costs are
All those costs are reasonable in the context...
Catering costs - the prices are set by the venue. You can have less food, less coffee, or sometimes change from sandwich bags to something less appetising, or not provide food. There's limited scope for change if you want to provide food and drink.
Marketing costs are reasonable on an event for Drupalcon size. Even with a loyal audience you need to tell them.
Event production are all the things like exhibition stands, build up and tear down, signage, awards, costs of security staff, banners, lighting, recording sessions, etc. You can sometimes trim these, but again it's not unreasonable.
The Drupal staff are fantastic. This is huge value for money.
Banking fees probably includes the cost of selling the ticket, which is done through a service. Unavoidable.
Wifi at $67K is completely reasonable. Drupalcons sometimes have to provide their own infrastructure because of the number of people with devices, plus you typically pay for bandwidth from a convention centre, and there's no way to avoid. I doubt this could be very much less. Broken connectivity and uncomfortable seats are things that spoil a conference.
Why don't we have our own
Why don't we have our own networking gear and bring it over to every major event?
Hardware can last 3-5 years, it's unreasonable to be renting these and paying this much twice a year.
Our company uses UniFi. The budget for a 800m2 is not that high.
https://www.ubnt.com/
Luís Pedro Algarvio
Site Reliability / DevOps Engineer.
Free and Open Source Software advocate.
Passionate about life and work.
lp.algarvio.org
1) Because you would need HW
1) Because you would need HW people.
2) Venues usually won't allow someone touch their network.
3) For that amount of people you need to solve also underlaying layer, not only WiFi.
4) Look on the shipping cost, this would be much higher.
Was not the case in Lispolis
Was not the case in Lispolis for our DrupalCamp Lisbon 2011 with 150 attendees.
You can't generalize.
Luís Pedro Algarvio
Site Reliability / DevOps Engineer.
Free and Open Source Software advocate.
Passionate about life and work.
lp.algarvio.org
As an attendee I would be
As an attendee I would be perfectly fine if there would be no (or minimal)
- Marketing - only hardcore Drupal people come to the conference anyway.
- Professional recording. Volunteers can handle a camera. All we need is to sort out the audio, but that's an equipment cost that can be spread across multiple cons and camps.
- Catering - If I asked to spend $150 less on ticket or catering, then I'd sort out my lunch by myself. Strangely, I've seen no survey on this.
- Wifi . Again, if I asked to spare $20 less on ticket or wifi… You can return the question. Would you pay $20 more to enjoy the sometimes-working wifi? Probably not.
- Banking fees: wire transfer was never offered.
- Professional recording - I
- Professional recording - I don't agree with you on this one. We've been doing this on several camps in the past 3 years and it's been always great pain even for quite skilled team. Don't forget about post production of ~190hours of videos (8 rooms x 8 hours x 3 days) - even just putting opening and closing slide takes you several days and couple of days to render it with appropriate HW.
- Wifi - I personally never had issue with Wifi except keynotes and closing session. Mobile signal can be often quite weak inside session rooms so I'm rather willing to pay for wifi. Wifi is also often bundled by venue.
- Wire transfer was never offered - I remember that there is this option, it's just less prominent. I guess it's because you need manual force to pair payments.
Yeah - it's not just
Yeah - it's not just recording and post production. It's editing. It's the livestream of the keynotes. It's transcoding and uploading afterwards. It used to have hosting component too, but now I think Youtube is used. It's hundreds of hours work to get it all done, even with bulk editing software.
The wifi bundled by venues is sometimes not good enough for Drupalcon. But in any case, to find that out you have to test. Fixing the wifi is not something that can be done without planning.
Banking fees. No it's not wire transfer that costs money, but hosting the payment system - by Eventbrite or a similar service or even card processing. You have to be able to take cards directly without using Paypal because PP restrictions mean that you may not get the money till 180 days afterwards. Meanwhile the venue has to be paid up 60 days ahead.
We are talking about $100K-
We are talking about $100K-$250K for hundreds of hours intern-level work. A good compromise could be to upload the videos straight after recording as we did at many early DrupalCons, and do the post-production at it's on pace or hire someone on a gig economy site to do it. Most of our con-videos are just slides with audio, easy to transcode and transfer.
If the procurement process would be open (having access to the actual line items), we could help to find the best value for the money. We could also help to answer questions about which venue type we prefer (Assembly, one of the largest geek con is organised in a stadium), what about food, wifi, whether we would travel to cheap locations, etc. Asking these questions the organisers would have the data to know what is the audience's preference and how much they are willing to pay for it. (In comparison, the price of a DC Vienna ticket costs two months of salary for couple of EU member countries' average employee. There is a place for high-profile business summits, but I think Drupalcon should be accessible for much wider range of audience.)
I fully agree. Also, let's
I fully agree. Also, let's not forget we, the EU Drupal community, car about these gatherings a lot. I think many would be willing to make certain sacrifices to keep this even going (unless it's going to cost more money, as it's already expensive).
Except getting access to the line items, we could also envision a new medium-term strategy. If DC EU is really targeted at die-hard Drupal-devs, that needs to change. More energy and time must be invested to get end-users to attend. In order to achieve that, the upcoming DCs EU could all be hosted in the eastern part of Europe. Some cities like Athens, Budapest, or others, are large hubs where we could (probably) easily organize a +1500 attendees event, yet keeping the cost of attending at a fraction of that of attending it in Amsterdam, London, or even Barcelona. Even if this would only cut the cost on the venue for the DA, the fact is that many more people could then afford to attend, making it more attractive to end-users that aren't sure if DC EU is worth the cost. For example, for 1 week (dates: 25.09 - 01.10) in central London, you will pay at least €400.- for your hotel alone (and that's super cheap, for a simple hotel, and probably pretty far from the venue), whereas in Budapest you'd pay about €250.- for the same period, for a 4* hotel. Add transportation costs, food, going out, and this all adds up to a huge delta. And yet, Budapest is probably as accessible by plane as London for most travelers.
Once more end-users start to attend, the DC EU will become more valuable to sponsors, which in turn will bring in more money. And once that's done, we could envision hosting the events all over Europe again, even in the parts where it's more expensive.
I blog about Drupal right here
Completely possible to change the cost of Europe
I can't come to Drupalcon this year :-( but it's totally possible to change the costs...
The biggest single cost in running any large event in Europe is the venue. That's because the way that venues are paid for differs from the US. There are a few ways to bring down this cost:
- make a multi-year deal.
- mimic the structure of the US venue booking
- make Drupalcon smaller
- search harder for a venue, be different
A multi-year deal would mean Drupalcon staying in one place but it's totally possible. But I don't think you'd save hundreds of thousands. It would need to be investigated.
In the USA convention centres are usually built by a group of hotels, and you can only attend the event if you stay in one of those. To mimic this, Drupalcon would have to bulk-buy hotel rooms - say 1,000 - then resell them to attendees. Financially this is hard - there's a huge up-front outlay and Drupalcon would be taking on the risk of cancellation. But this could save hundreds of thousands.
The costs of venues increases exponentially-ish with the size. So restricting Drupalcon to, say, 1,000 people, would make the venue much, much cheaper. This also goes for changing the format: for example a single stream, with everyone in one room, would mean that you could hold the event in a cinema.
Searching harder for a venue is what i think is the best option. It took me the best part of 3 months to find the venue for Drupalcon London, and the difference in price between the most expensive we looked at, and the one we chose was around £300,000, from memory. The venue was far from perfect, but it made the event economically sound. London was, I think, the only European conference in recent years to make a profit.
Finding the venue was hard. It was only possible because of the time put in. And it would have been very unlikely for someone based in the USA to find that venue because it wasn't listed in any of the conference venue directories.
And that's the point about being different... I also looked at having London in a tent city, or being like Szeged and taking up the whole of Cambridge, or having outdoor events. (It was almost Drupalcon Cambridge - 1 vote made the difference.) Each have problems - e.g to take over a town you need a university city and Drupalcon would have to be during holidays/August - but the problems are solveable. It's totally possible to save hundreds of thousands through changing the venue.
And that brings me to the last point. Flying people in from the USA, and having them stay is necessary at some points, but it's expensive. It looks like it cost $50,000 for Dublin. Much of this could be avoided by paying some local community members to be the hands on the ground. Finding people who know about events and who are in Drupal is hard, but you could create them. This wouldn't save hundreds of thousands, but could save tens.
Edit: I forgot about the location - an event in Greece will be cheaper than an even in London. This can be significantly different. But it can be harder for delegates because travel can be more expensive if the event isn't in a hub city.
"Lots of planets have a north"
The point about being a "hub city" could also be interesting to explore: hub cities aren't always where you expect them to be.
For example, since moving from a fair distance outside Oxford (even out of the city, very expensive) to close to the rail station in Sheffield (much cheaper) we've actually felt more connected to most big cities in the UK: Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and even London (being within basically walking distance of a 2hr train to St Pancras is in some ways more accessible than being within bussing distance of a 1+hr train to Paddington.)
--
J-P Stacey, software gardener, Magnetic Phield
There's a fundamental mistake in these calculations!
To finally judge the profitability of a Drupal Con you need to look at the return on investment, too.
If you treat a Drupal Con to be an investment to grow the community and to motivate the community to increase their contributions, you have to treat the contributions as "return".
According to http://drupalcores.com/countries.html the European community contributed approx. 50% of Drupal 8 Core development. On the other hand, North America only contributed approx. 30% within the same time frame.
If the Drupal Con North America "works" because it is attractive for sponsors that can "sell" Drupal services there, it is absolutely valid that they "pay for" or "invest in" the European Drupal Con that motivates a part of the community to produce the product they sell.
In other words it is totally wrong to judge both conferences individually. The balance has to include both events. You can't treat them individually.
Jarltech
Totally agree!
Totally agree!
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