Glasgow Tech Christmas Party 2018 — Behind the Scenes

Another year, another Glasgow Tech Christmas Party! On Friday 19th December 2018, people from across the Glasgow tech community came together to bring to a close another great year.

For those that are interested, this post gives a bit more detail about what went on behind the scenes to put on the event.

Numbers

First off, let’s look at some numbers, compared to 2017’s event.

Tickets:

• 70 (-50) available tickets
• 46 (-26) tickets allocated
• 34 (-22) people checked in on the night
• 0 (-7) tickets allocated on the door
• £385 net ticket sales

Sponsors:

• 3 (-1) sponsors (thanks again to Streamba Ltd, Burness Paull, and BBC!)
• £1000 (-£1280) invoiced sponsorship
• £700 (-£1580) collected sponsorship (more on this below)

Costs on the Night:

• £515 (-£1570) cost of food
• £600 (-£65) bar bill

Total remaining:

£700+£385 -£515-£600=-£30

Goal

With the Global Day of Coderetreat in November 2018, and a wedding in February 2019, the aim for 2018’s event was simple — put on the Glasgow Tech Christmas Party with as little input as possible.

Venue

For 2017’s event, the decision was taken to try a bigger venue. With the goal for 2018’s event, the Raven seemed like an easy choice. Central location, great staff, decent food at a good price — what’s not to like?

In previous years, attendees were checked in and given a couple of tokens for getting a drink at the bar. This meant that I spent most of the event doing just that. Looking at this year’s goal, I just set up a bar tab. This made the event much better for me at least, as I got to participate a lot more. Personally, though, the jury’s still out on whether it’s a necessary part of the event.

Tickets

Ticket sales over time

Ticket sales per day

Tickets were made available quite late this year — just a few weeks before the event. In previous years, I’ve put effort in to reaching out to meet ups, universities, trying out twitter ads, etc. While I did tweet a few times, on the whole I didn’t do much to promote this year’s event.

The lack of promotion and the late posting of the event both seem to be the most likely reasons for the reduction in ticket sales this year.

Sponsorship

The sponsorship tiers offered this year were almost identical to last years.

It was great to have Streamba and Burness Paull support the event for another year, and to have the BBC on board, after they also supported the Glasgow edition of Global Day of Coderetreat 2018.

In previous years I was able to use my business, Defining Technology, to issue invoices. Since joining Skyscanner in 2018 (yay!), that company is no longer active. This presented a new problem, in terms of how to handle sponsorship.

In the end, I opted to issue invoices from myself, which brought about it’s own set of problems. I’m still following up with one organisation, hence the difference between invoiced and collected sponsorship amounts above. If and when that money is received, it’ll be donated to Mind, a mental health charity.

Overall, the collected sponsorship, with the money from ticket sales, pretty much covered the costs of the event this year.

Points for Next Year

There are a couple of points that I thought about after the event:

• Promoting the event is important
• Bar tab and bar tokens just seem to be a faf — maybe better reducing the ticket price instead?
• People seem to be unsure of who the event is aimed at—a few people I talked to thought of it as just for contractors and freelancers.
• Not having a business/organisation makes it difficult to collect sponsorship

Most of all, though, I’ve been reflecting on having organised a number of events now. Initially, while I tried to organise the event with others, it turned in to herding cats. So, for a while, I’ve ended up just organising events on my own.

While I’ve learnt a lot, running an event on your own has it’s challenges. In the end, it takes up a lot more time and energy than you’d think — 5 mins here and there, chasing sponsors and promoting the event, soon adds up!

While I’ve had plenty of offers of help, I have been rather reluctant because of my previous experiences. One of the most important takeaways from this event (and Global Day of Coderetreat) is that, at least for my own sanity, I want to get better at accepting help.

So, with that in mind, if you’d like to help with 2019’s Glasgow Tech Christmas Party, or indeed any other event I’m organising, please get in touch!

Thanks

A big thank you to all that helped with this event, in particular:

• All the sponsors (Streamba Ltd, Burness Paull, and BBC)
• Michael Hayes, for checking in and asking how things are going, as well as offering advice and support (in 2018 and in previous years)
• You! The event is all about bringing people in the community together, so it wouldn’t have been the same without all those that attended