The OpenWater Blog

4 Simple Ways to Save Money at Your Next Conference

As the executive, it’s in your best interest to save money. However, it’s also in your best interest to hold a premium quality conference to build prestige for your organization. Yet, it’s still important that you save money, wherever possible.

Balancing these interests can be challenging, but isn’t impossible. Below are 4 strategies you can implement with your conference managers and other staff members to more easily manage your conference and, most importantly, its costs.

1. Invest in Long-Term Branding

It’s expensive to create branding materials year after year. Thus, if you can invest in more generic branding that stays true to your organization but not your event theme, you can re-use these materials and represent your theme in other ways. Some qualities that likely change year to year include:

1. Date and year;
2. Hashtag; and
3. Sponsors

You may even want to invest in branding where you can easily alter the details above.

2. Streamline Underlying Processes

Running your organization as a well-oiled machine affects more than just time efficiencies, it affects costs too. This means you need to streamline and coordinate processes to save money.

For example, you should instruct your conference managers to send out attendee information electronically rather than by mail, as was customary in the past. Doing so will make your organization more efficient and save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars depending on the number of individuals attending your conference.

3. Take Time to Negotiate

With so many other administrative tasks going on in your organization, it’s simple to agree on upfront costs from suppliers to save time and hassle. However, this is a simple way to spend too much money.

Negotiate contracts – perhaps even contracts for more than one year – to save money, especially if you know you are going to hold your conference annually. This will help you save on the premium that comes with one-time rentals or service-arrangements and maintain quality from year to year as well.

4. Be Open to Other Types of Sponsorships

Not all sponsorships need to be money-based to be lucrative for your organization. In fact, sponsorships where other companies provide their product or service for free to your attendees may be more beneficial for your organization, and more sensible in terms of the value you’re getting in the deal.

It’s important to be open to sponsorships of all sorts, especially as an executive director in charge of making such decisions.

Take Control of Costs at Your Next Conference

While your conference manager will make many of the decisions that affect costs in your organization, you as executive director wield a great deal of power as well. In fact, you will make many decisions at more general, broader levels that will directly impact how your conference operates and, perhaps even more critically, how much it costs.

So, where can you cut costs? Share your thoughts in the comments below, whether related to one of our tips or something of your own!

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