Geekflex

Many attendees noticed that the career fair was drastically toned down this year compared to previous years, and that we also had fewer sponsors. One of the main reasons for that was the stock market taking a serious hit in early October. A lot of the companies we had been negotiating with — even those that have previously attended CUSEC (and loved it) — could no longer afford to attend.

The way sponsorship works at CUSEC is fairly straightforward. We put together a sponsorship package which we send out to companies that we think will be interested in. The package is just a document gives a brief idea of what CUSEC is, who the delegates are and what our previous sponsors have said. It also includes a list of sponsorship “levels”, each of which has a price tag associated with it. Each level also includes a number of benefits such as: a booth during the career fair, the ability to supply bag inserts, their logo displayed prominently and having conference rooms “named” after them.

Most companies are willing to pay a significant sum to have access to top notch students, and those are the kinds of students we have at CUSEC. That’s not just hearsay. The feedback we get from our sponsors is astounding. They are extremely pleased with the recruits they get from CUSEC. Many of my friends found their full time jobs through CUSEC, as did I. As Tim Bray said:

everybody I know in the biz is hungry for talent, and here are 350 kids, a high proportion of them about to graduate, who care enough about what they’re doing to take the trouble to go to a three-day conference including a Saturday. Talk about self-selecting good candidates.

We begin negotiating with companies in the late summer and early fall. By October we begin to finalize the contracts, and by November we get them signed. The money starts to roll in during December and January, which is all well and good since most of our expenses aren’t due until the conference actually starts. We’re actually very flexible with how we work with our sponsors. The costs of our packages can be mixed and matched with merchandise to give out at the closing ceremonies, or a service that’s provided to us free of charge.

This year, we were negotiating with a record number of companies. We started off incredibly strong and had garnered a lot of interest. As per our normal operating procedure we expected to finalize the contracts starting in October … then poof. A lot of companies lost a lot of money. Hiring freezes were everywhere, and few had the budget to spend on recruiting. And believe me, many of these companies tried to dig pretty deep, too. Their HR departments know how valuable it is to recruit at CUSEC. But there’s a limit to how much you can compromise. The danger is that if you make a special deal with one sponsor, you run the risk of another sponsor finding out about it. Then you could up in a situation where Initrode complains that Initech paid less money but got a bigger booth, or more exposure, or something like that. Maintaining a trustworthy relationship with our sponsors is something very important to us, so we make sure to treat them equally and fairly.

Suffice it to say our sponsorship packages aren’t cheap. They provide a huge chunk of our funding. Conferences are expensive to run, and CUSEC is no exception. The money has to come from somewhere, and if it all came from delegates it would cost a hell of a lot more than $60 per person. Here are just some of the factors that go into the costs.

Booking the conference centre. Even though January is a relatively slow season, this ain’t cheap. We need two conference rooms and open space for three full days (and nights). This includes tons of hidden costs that go beyond simply holding the rooms: there need to be a Maitre D’ to oversee the event; there needs to be internet on site, since the hotel’s basic wireless can’t handle so many connections; staff needs to be hired to deliver and clean up the coffee, keep the water jugs filled, and all these other little details.

Coffee during transitions. Yup, each coffee break costs money. And these are usually per-person charges (and it’s more expensive than Starbuck’s. No, seriously). We have to estimate how many people will drink coffee (or tea) and order enough for that amount. We usually underestimate, because if we fail to reach the minimum then we get charged for the excess. This is how conference centres operate. In addition to that, every conference centre I’ve ever known has a rule against bringing in outside food. This is both because the centres’ caterers maintain a monopoly on the food served on site, and also because the centre is responsible should anyone come down with food poisoning. So we can’t simply run to Tim Horton’s and bring back a few giant jugs of coffee. (Likewise, we also can’t run to Subway and bring back 400 sandwiches.)

Keynote speakers are the foundation of the conference. We make sure to treat them very well. If we’ve invited a keynote speaker, we will pay for their transportation to Montreal, their stay at the hotel, and for their food during the conference. We don’t pay the keynote speakers to speak. Instead, we cover their expenses so that it shouldn’t cost them anything. This is a significant portion of our budget, but it is certainly not one we’re willing to compromise. The experience we give our speakers is what encourages more speakers to come, and the wonderful things our speakers have said makes it all worth it. We want to bring the best speakers we possibly can, and this is a sure-fire way to ensure that they have few excuses for not coming.

Miscellaneous little things that all add up: t-shirts, nametags, printing the proceedings, printing up posters to display on campuses, and various incidentals that happen while the conference is running. These may not seem like much but believe me they add up. The only perks that organizers get as far as our budget is concerned are a complimentary stay in the hotel as well as lunch and dinner all three days. We’re pretty strict with what we’ll reimburse our organizers for, and in fact we even have strict limits on how much our meals can cost. (Also, CUSEC will never pay for alcohol. That’s what my credit card is for… :-S)

Banquets, Cocktails, etc., which we didn’t have this year, because we simply couldn’t afford them. A banquet isn’t cheap. You need to hire caterers, book a ballroom, pay for the staff, bar, and all the stuff that goes along with it. We made a decision very early on that unless we could afford to do a banquet properly this year, we weren’t going to do one. The banquet in CUSEC 2008 was a disaster. Some people were lucky enough to get their food in a reasonable amount of time, while others (like yours truly) were still awaiting their soup while people kept harassing them “Hey, Skrud! Where are we going drinking tonight!?!” and then by the time I finally got my meal and got out of the restaurant, the bar I had sent everyone to was so packed that I couldn’t even get in. Never again. (Note I am most certainly not the only one to have had a poor experience with that banquet. It got many more complaints than praise.)

A proper banquet is expensive. To hold it in a hotel or conference centre, you’re required to use that venue’s own caterers. They don’t come cheap. Would any of you have been satisfied if your seven-course meal consisted of seven slightly differently shaped lettuce leaves? This is also why CUSEC doesn’t provide catered lunches. If we wanted to hold the banquet elsewhere, such as at an external banquet hall where we could find our own caterers, then we’d be stuck with the trouble of getting people there and back. Banquet halls that aren’t in hotels or conference centres are also not usually downtown. This would mean adding the cost of hiring a shuttle bus, or paying for metro passes for everyone.

We were hoping to compromise and provide a cocktail instead of a banquet. Always thinking, we knew a cocktail would be less expensive. We could provide, say a single drink ticket (good for alcohol or a non-alcoholic beverage) and make the rest of the event a cash bar. If we had the extra cash, maybe some h’ors d’oeuvres as well. While it would’ve cost us less than half of a swanky banquet, the lower amount sponsorship this year meant that we had to cut it.

Sponsorship is a lot of work, and we had to stick to our guns and be incredibly persistent to get even the small number of sponsors you saw at the career fair. Our Director of Sponsorship, Juan, put in an incredible amount of effort and an astronomical amount of time to make it happen, cold-calling companies if she needed to, leaving voicemails and calling back, never taking “no” for an answer. CUSEC 2009 would never have happened if it weren’t for her efforts. Next time you see her, make sure to give her a hug.

One of the toughest things about planning CUSEC 2009 was finding the right combination of conference centre and hotel. Ideally we were hoping to hold the conference in the same hotel that delegates were staying in, minimizing the distance that people had to travel in the morning. We searched the city high and low, trying to negotiate not only for the best rates in terms of conference space, but also for a hotel that would give us a discounted room rate.

To complicate matters further, CUSEC is dual-tracked. That means that except for keynote speakers, there would be two presentations going on simultaneously. This meant that we’d need to have two separate rooms. One big room that splits in two doesn’t work well because of the fact that it takes time to set up the barrier, and you’d have to have to sets of AV equipment which can be linked together for keynotes and then separated for dual-tracked sessions. We need two separate rooms. We also need room to host a career fair and for students to mingle.

Those of you that have attended CUSEC more than once will know that CUSEC has been growing steadily. In 2008, we had way too many people standing at the back. We had to add more chairs at the last minute. A lot of people have asked me why we didn’t return to that venue and the reason is, quite simply, the fact that they don’t have enough room for us. Those conference rooms we had in 2008? Yeah, they actually have a posted capacity of 280 people. We were well over 300 people jam packed in there. We were anticipating even more growth this year, and we knew that returning to that venue wouldn’t work for us again.

We explored nearly every hotel in the city and met with many of their managers. (And by “we” I mean that the bulk of the work was done by our Director of Logistics, Claudiu, and our Director of Events, Kyle.) A lot of the places we checked out which had adequate conference space also had prohibitively expensive hotel rooms, and we wouldn’t have accepted a higher price than $100 per night for quad occupancy. Yes, our students crash four people to a room ¹. The good news is that booking some fifty rooms in a hotel during an otherwise low-occupancy period is a bargaining chip. And we got some pretty good offers, but none of them were good enough. We had to play hardball. (Again, by “we”, I mean Claudiu. The man is a star.)

I’ll spare you the grimy details, stories of near-success and near-failure — since I obviously can’t mention the names of all the people and hotels we dealt with. Eventually, we had to give up on the idea of hosting CUSEC in the same hotel that housed delegates, since we simply couldn’t work out the numbers. Suffice it to say that the venue we nailed this year had everything we needed (and in fact, had previously hosted CUSEC as well). They even offered us hotel rooms at a very inexpensive rate, but unfortunately they had very few rooms with two double beds, and so we opted to stay in the hotel across the street. If you’re wondering why the cost of the hotel was more than $100 per night — well, we had a near-unanimous decision amongst all the head delegates to go for it anyway, since the next-best option was to stay at a hotel that was a good 10 minute walk away.

Unfortunately, our venue didn’t have as much room as last year for the career fair and mingling. We thought the atrium (where the four booths were set up) was enough space, but apparently not. It was too crowded. The reason we want the career fair in an open lobby area is so that it’s visible. Delegates will see the booths as they transition between the two rooms, and as they go get coffee. One of the consistent notes of feedback we get from our sponsors is that they like the fact that they’re visible and not shoved into an anterior conference room down the hallway from the main conference. Hallways are the devil. If a delegate has to walk down a hallway to get somewhere, he or she will very likely simply not go. You might disagree, but after years of attending these kinds of events this is what I’ve noticed. An advantage of not having many sponsors this year was that we managed to fit the ones we did have into such a cramped space.

This was the first year we were looking for a venue that could accommodate such a large number of people, and indeed we expect CUSEC to grow even more in the future. This year taught us a lot, and that will help next year’s team decide on a venue as well.