The next few months will be tough for people, WordPress and the community. WordCamps are being cancelled around the world and we were the first in the chain.
We were lucky to have a very good team working on both possibilities:
- Continuing executing the WordCamp
- Cancel or postpone the WordCamp
While we were printing our swag and designing the final floor plans, we were also discussing with vendors on possible exit plans.
We didn’t want to cancel — but we needed to plan for that eventuality as well.
Because of all the active planning by the WordCamp Asia 2020 team and the help afforded to us by WordCamp Central, we managed to lower the cost of cancellation to less than $20,000. For context, that is around 6.25% of our budget.
The single biggest ticket item as you might guess is the venue and its associated costs. Our venue team managed to negotiate postponing for a year without incurring any costs. We had a similar experience with the social events team and a similar graciousness offered by ICONSIAM was matched by our partner hotel, Royal Orchid Sheraton.
Items that could not be cancelled are being repurposed for next year — it’s going to be amazing.
While cancellation came at a relatively low cost to the organising team, there were great personal costs of flights, hotels, time from attendees, sponsors, volunteers, speakers and organisers alike. We couldn’t do much around personal costs. Other WordPress companies came into the picture to help with that. We went with offering full ticket refunds and a free one to the next conference.
I mentioned that we had a cancellation cost of around $20,000. In the grand scheme of things, it seems like a tiny amount but it could also very well support the running of a city WordCamp.
We want to thank the sponsors for helping out by donating a partial amount of their sponsorship contributions.
These were the 4 companies that just asked first (and we hit our cancellation cost requirements right away) — at least 1/3 of our sponsors offered to either donate a partial sum of their sponsorship or the full amount.
Every sponsor answered that they were looking to sponsor again in 2021.
We want to thank all of the support granted by these sponsors to us and the WordPress Community. We also want to especially thank Harmony from WordCamp Central who has been single-handedly handling all these refunds with all 39 of our sponsors.
Because of everyone’s generosity and support, we were able to publish our plan for WordCamp Asia 2021. We really hope to see you there and catch up.