How to Start a Data Conference
The Money, The Team, The Coffee
Everyone who's been to a good data conference has thought about starting one. Almost nobody knows what's actually involved.
Ryan and Aaron are joined by Stephanie Saville, the nonprofit event planner behind the Data in the D conference, for a soup-to-nuts look at how it really got built — including the parts that don't make the highlight reel.
We get into: why you need a community before you need a conference; the chicken-and-egg problem of putting down a venue deposit with zero dollars in the bank; choosing between a ticket-funded conference and a sponsor-funded one, and what that decision does to everything else; how sponsorship actually works, including why sponsors now want attendee job titles before they'll write a check; and why the sessions — the part everyone wants to talk about — are the easy part.
Plus the details nobody plans for: shipping vendors' boxes home after the show, a keynote whose travel falls through the day before, a two-hour AV check that turns into six, and the single loudest piece of attendee feedback we got in year one. (It was the coffee.)
Lear about this year’s Data in the D conference
