[Linux-aus] Treasurers Report 2012

[Michael Still]

On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Joshua Hesketh <josh at nitrotech.org> wrote:
> Awesome breakdown aj. Thanks for that :-)
>
> I have some thoughts on swag but they are for another time ;-). It
> certainly does take up a huge amount though.

Hi I'm Michael, and I've recently spent a large amount of money on swag...

When we bid for for LCA2013 we intended to spend less on swag than
previous years. Specifically, eliminating expensive backpacks was one
of the things we wanted to do. However -- it turns out that what
actually ended up happening is that we reused that money on other swag
items. So overall my gut feel is our swag spend is inline with
previous conferences?

Is swag a good use of money? I think it is from a delegate
perspective. You can't argue that $950 for a week long conference is a
lot of money -- many conferences charge that for a day. I see a lot of
people wearing swag from previous LCAs around the place (so it clearly
gets used), and people are certainly excited when they get handed it.

Perhaps one solution is to be more aggressive with the no swag options
next year? We let people register with no swag selected, but they
didn't get a discount for doing that. Perhaps the next logical step is
to offer a discount and see what happens.

I would tell you what percentage of our operating budget swag ended up
being, but Google Spreadsheets appears to be down at the moment.

Michael