Financial Post Mortem For The Commit Your Code Conference

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/
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/dthompsondev.bsky.social
Twitter https://twitter.com/DThompsonDev

The above is the detailed content of Financial Post Mortem For The Commit Your Code Conference. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!