The Case for Affordable Event Tickets
Yes, yes, yes. “Affordable” is relative, but what we’re talking about here is making steps to help people from relatively diverse backgrounds attend events.
For Diverse Speakers and Attendees
Thankfully, there’s a fresh shift towards making events more inclusive. A lot of organizers are acknowledging that they have to do something to get a more diverse group of people involved in their events. Event attendees are also tired of the same old speakers in rotation.
So, what does it take to enable that?
Imagine you still use an iPod. Or maybe you don’t even have to imagine. But do imagine that there’s only one artist on it and they only released one album. It’s the only option you have to listen to on your commute to work every day, and you spend a lot of your professional life on the train.
The same thing happens when there’s a homogenous batch of able-bodied, cis, white, male, middle-to-upper-class people that gets recycled among the event community; it gets stale.
You won’t learn any new lyrics listening to the same songs all the time.
When it’s encouraged that organizers seek diverse speakers and attendees, those attendees are inevitably going to get involved in different conversations because of the different experiences available to interact about.
So, how to attract people of different ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds to events?
Given where you’re reading this, you should take a nod from DjangoCon US’ pricing structure. They use different bands of pricing for tickets to encourage diverse attendees to come to their event.
For Students and Unemployed
The next generation and some of the current generation in the tech space have obstacles in their way when it comes to benefiting from what people in more privileged positions can afford to learn from events like DjangoCon US.
Given their circumstances, unemployed people and those studying generally don’t have access to the funds needed to pay for full-price tickets to events. But a lack of money doesn’t imply a lack of competence.
In the case of students, they spend their days knee-deep in innovative ideas in their chosen fields and are active in finding original approaches to solving the problems faced by those in the careers they’ll inevitably end up in.
When it comes to the unemployed, obstacles such as the inability to work due to disability, the end of specialist projects and the nature of the gig economy are all reasons why highly competent, potential event-goers can’t foot the bill. But that doesn’t make them in anyway less desirable to have around. Quite the contrary.
Tito has spent a whole month of their blog space talking about how to secure sponsorship for your event which can help to fund ticket discounts and making way for more people to enjoy events. They’ve also made it simple to purchase different types of tickets.
Tito has been making event software to sell and manage tickets for the past 5 years because they want to make that process as easy as humanly possible. They’re small, self-funded and located in Dublin, Ireland. You can track their progress and read their experiences here.