If you’ve attended BSidesLV before, you’ve seen what happens days of show. It started off with a house with a pool, a BBQ, 5 sponsors and about 150 people hanging out and listening to talks. In 5 years, it has grown to over 1000 Participants, 75 volunteers, 15 Staff, *60 Speakers, over 15 sponsors, 3 non-profits that we support, a CTF an SECTF and a LPV. And through all this growth, we’ve kept to our original premise of keeping information free and not charging our participants an entry fee. (Yes, we have a Donor level, but that is voluntary and very limited – we still give out the participant badges for free – over 900 this year.) If you’ve helped to plan other BSides before, you know what goes into planning one. Or at least the parts that you were involved with. The over all process isn’t that hard. Raise money, negotiate contracts with vendors, sign contracts, pay money, show-up, set-up, have a con, tear-down, go home. The issue is, the larger the event, the more overhead fees you have.
Last year cost us approx $87K all told, for the Artisan buyout, food for everyone (4 meals each), the shuttles, tshirts, badges, event insurance, radios, printing, table and chair rental etc. This year, due to the new venue, we have more overhead. About $40K more. Tables are $20ea/day (instead of $5ea/day from the rental company), power is $85 PER DROP (instead of included). The sound systems, which we’re renting from the venue and run through the house system is another $4K in equipment and labor. We’re looking at a $130K bill. We have $72K in the bank and another $13K outstanding. That’s another $45K we still need to raise, in order to cover our overhead. And we’ve lost a few of the big sponsors that we had last year, due to budget cuts on their end, companys being acquired by other companys and companys having to restructure budgets due to new acquisitions.
And that $130K doesn’t include feeding everyone. Breakfast and lunch for the participants (if you assume that only half of the participants will be eating any given meal) would cost us another $90K at hotel catering prices. We can’t afford to feed everyone this year, so we’re keeping it simple and just feeding our volunteers, because they’re putting time and effort into making BSidesLV run smoothly, starting early and staying late. (And before you ask, “Well, why don’t you just cut that part of the budget?”, we’re obligated by contract with the venue to spend $30K on Food & Beverage, so cutting that woudn’t really help our overhead – we’d still have to pay it to the venue.)
$45K might sound overwhelming, but if we break that down to 4 $10K sponsors and 1 $5K sponsor, or 6 $7.5K sponsors, or 9 $5K sponsors, or 15 $3K sponsors, or a combination thereof, it’s not as bad as it seems. The issue is that we only have 4 weeks left to raise it.
Please, even if you work for a startup, that might have to REALLY think about a $3K Sponsorship, at least ask? Or if you have a good relationship with any of your vendors and they’re not already sponsoring us, see if you can interest them.
Here’s the Sponsorship kit – the levels are on the last four pages. Feel free to spread it far and wide.
You can also direct them to our Sponor page:
bsideslv.org/sponors
Or have them email us and we’ll talk to them – or you email us their info and we’ll contact them.
sponsors@bsideslv.org
We have some serious plans in the works to turn this all around next year and cut our budget down considerably AND be able to feed everyone again, but for this year, we’re finding that we are really needing to request your assistance.
And if you’re so inclined to just kick in some cash yourself, but a sponsorship level is way out of your league, You can gift us at PayPal, to info@bsideslv.org
Unfortunately we’re already out of Donor Level Badges this year (they’ve already been ordered.) And the event is at capacity, so we can’t even offer you a participant badge, but we can offer you our thanks via twitter and will gladly list you on our website, if you’d like. Just let us know in the note section of your donation.
Thanks for reading.
On behalf of the BSidesLV Board of Directors,
-= Genevieve K. Southwick (AKA Banasidhe)
*EDIT: The orginal post stated 600 participants and 100 speakers. It’s actually over 1000 participants and 60 speakers. Apologies. I was doing calclations before coffee. – GK
