I will never stress it enough, a sound budget most of the times ensures a successful event.
A structured budget helps in monitoring costs, understanding what you can afford, reporting to management
and most of all keeping things under control. In this post a bit on budgeting and cutting costs.

Budget Items

The first step in coming up with a comprehensive example, conference budget is to separate expenditures
and income. For an average conference EXPENDITURES will be:

  • Venue
  • Advertising and Promotion
  • Speakers/Performers token
  • Speakers/Performers accommodation
  • Catering(can be included if book hotel)
  • Equipment
  • Team/Staff
  • Admin
  • Badges

Put all these pressure to Kesari Events team, they will take care of everything along with negotiation.

Costs Cutting

Second step is cutting costs. Why? I see the event manager mission as spending the least amount of money
while making everyone participating or having interest in the event happy.

Let’s see some tricks:

I will always prefer to go larger. One main event helps you in leveraging your financial/promotional/logistic
efforts in one direction. Nevertheless, if we look at events as complex structures of small activities, increasing
the number of activities might increase total risk, while shrinking the structure might work well.
If we e.g. have 300 people event with three different promotional campaigns, we will have to probably
manage 3 separate ad agencies. One main event would put the things together and minimize risk while
cutting costs. Of course it is necessary to have a content that could be homogeneously wrapped together in
one day.

– One vs Multiple Suppliers :

As for the above working with a trustable supplier gives you more bargaining power. But then again risk increases. In this instance is always useful to have a plan B with some last minute AV solutions or catering contingency plan.

– Publishing :

Do your own publishing. There are several free tools to come up with sound promotional material. Leverage on that as much as you can, as outsourcing in this case could be very expensive. The fact that I did the badges myself for the last event I organized, also gave me a lot of flexibility to modify names from registration forms or add new people that showed up at the conference without registering.

– Come up with a sound sponsorship strategy :

Selling tickets or registrations could test your heart seriously. If everything is in place you should be able to sell out all the tickets you have planned to give away From my experience that does not happen all the time.

Sponsors help in reducing the leverage on ticket as the main source of income thus diversifying risk. If you
have visibility, sell it to 2 or 3 sponsors that might be interested in your target.
Come up with advertising solutions tailored to your prospect, design target profiles and give them numbers. 2
or 3 sponsor might help financially as much as 200 registrations so you might want to consider to invest in
this sense.

– Look out for public funds :

Depending on the event content there might be a community interested in sponsoring an event with public funds available. Leverage on that.

– Look for discounts and negotiate :

Having the venue to manage most of the activities increases the price and thus your bargaining power toward a better rate. Bulk up and ask for a good price and let them know you are considering different options. I am sure you’ll end up surprised of people reactions.