Free Conferences

Earlier today I was reading the Financial Times (unusual for me, but I found that the Saturday paper is a good read).

One article that caught my eye was Mike Southon's Take the free and easy route
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/130b6ddc-d5fa-11de-b80f-00144feabdc0.html
where he looks at the concept of “free” business models especially in relational to conferences.

His conclusion was that the approaches to use were things like that
- specific free offers to drive business for his members:
- congress centres could offer unused space to the local community;
- or hotels and venues could waive charges on marginal items, such as wi-fi.

The International Congress and Convention Assoviation (ICCA) uses free models to good effect, offering one free congress registration to all first-timers in the year they join, an extensive PR kit with details of more than 350 media organisations and an online destination comparison system.
Which led to a 20% increase in attendees.

But I felt that Mike missed the point. The free business model concept of "offer(ing) everything for free first and build a business model later – as Google, Facebook and YouTube have done" takes you to a different place.

The real free conference approach would be focused on removing conference fees and so increasing attendance. As the attendee volumes should be higher, the charges for commercial exhibition space could be higher which could cover the fixed conference charges.

Obviously the topic has to be something of interest.

But I've seen this work on things like the cloud computing conference Cloud Scotland, OK on a small scale but it could work on a bigger scale as well.

Its a different sort of conference and must be considered valuable to be successful, so there is a real balancing game to play.