When you buy a ticket to attend a UKNOF event you’re making a contribution to our costs. This article explains our costs, risks, and sources of income. It also describes a new subscription package we are developing.

What Are UKNOF’s Costs?

UKNOF has two broad sets of costs: those that are directly related to a specific event and those that keep the organisation running.

When we run a hybrid event we have costs for:

  • Venue rental
  • Audio Visual systems and electricity
  • Catering
  • Insurance and other expenses

We also have costs for getting the event up and running and maintaining our online services.

These include:

  • Event management
  • Sponsor and Patron management
  • Provision of technical services

In addition to significant volunteer work to develop agendas, communications, advise and literally make events happen, these activities require a whole FTE.

So What Does Your Ticket Cover?

When you buy a ticket you are covering about a third of the cost of attending a UKNOF event. Sponsors and Patrons cover the rest. When you buy after the early bird registration has ended it can cost us even more. This is because venues charge us based on predicted attendance. They charge us at a higher rate for late additions.

We try to reduce our risk to overage charges at venues by encouraging early registration. We raise the price of a ticket after a cut off date because we want you to pay the lower price and make the number of people attending more predictable.

Give Us Some Numbers

In a normal year it costs about £130,000 a year to run UKNOF. The precise number varies from year to year depending on the location of events and how early we are able to lock in venue pricing.

About £80,000 is used to run events and maintain our online services, like Mattermost, the mailing list, and our web properties. The other £50,000 is what it costs to keep UKNOF running.

Introducing Event Subscriptions

We want to achieve three things:

  1. Keep the cost of attending UKNOF event as low as possible
  2. Reduce the risk we take on related to ticket income
  3. Introduce new participants who are early in their career

We will do this by introducing subscription packages. Individuals will be able to buy a pack of three tickets to attend a full year of events. But companies will be able to buy bigger packs of tickets. This should make it easier for them to send groups of staff to meet industry colleagues and learn about new developments.

Your Input Needed

We hope the explanation of our costs and risks is useful. We also hope you find the subscription idea interesting.

We’d like your input on whether this would be useful to you as an individual or a company.

Please let us know your thoughts at board@uknof.org.uk. If there is enough interest we’d like to arrange a focus group to help us understand how we can make this programme work best for you.