Measure of Music | How-To Guide Part 1: Costs & Logistics
Measure of Music was a three-day music & data conference & workshop/hackathon with 1000+ viewers, participants & contributors. The entire event was done for less than $250, took less than 3 months to plan, ran on Zoom, and was live-streamed to YouTube Live for spectators. Read more about it on measureofmusic.com.
I don’t consider a big milestone in my life done until I recap it, so to close out the first Measure of Music, I’m writing a series of how to/reflective guide of the weekend starting with the logistics and costs. Because I wrote several guides for the sponsors, participants & volunteers, I’m not going to re-write all the steps but I will share all of the guides, sheets & more that I used to help run the weekend.
Guides & Sheets:
Participant Guide
16-page guide where I gave the participants all the information for the event & they could reference it throughout the weekend including code of conduct, info about data available and restrictions, prizes and more.
Volunteer Guide
31-page guide (!!!) for those that were nice enough to volunteer their time for the weekend with instructions on each task, a detailed step-by-step schedule & info for the event. Providing a redacted version for privacy to volunteers & to mask some API keys.
Volunteer Sign Up Sheet
I created a sheet with 4 hour slots of time so the volunteers could fill in their availability. Redacted version provided.
Mentor Sign Up Form
Mentors filled in their availability & then had that time divided into 20 min intervals so that Teams could book times to speak with mentors. Each mentor had their own tab that listed their skills, their company & title. Redacted version provided.
Involvement Package
Put together a guide to those that wanted to be involved as mentors, judges, volunteers or speakers so they could easily see all the info about the event to make their decision regarding involvement:
Sponsorship Package
A document sent to sponsors to provide them with details on what they have to provide as sponsors (only requirement this time was a prize, though they were encouraged to provide data, a business use case and a judge). Also outlines what we provide back to them.
Slack Channel:
Throughout the weekend there was a Slack channel for all participants and contributors (except judges to maintain impartiality).
Channels:
#intros — Introduce yourself! Where are you from? What do you do?
#help — For music, data, coding, general help from other participants, volunteers & mentors.
#opportunities — For jobs, internships, co-founder, etc. requests & asks.
#general — For general Measure of Music talk about the talks, the data/APIs, cool insights you find, new public data sources you find interesting, etc.
#data_sources — A place to drop in or find interesting public data sources
#music_recommendations — Post your playlists, last.fm, music recommendations, music from your country or hometown, your music, etc.
#random — Wanna share pet pics, get lunch ideas, have an impromptu gave of Among Us? All fair game to discuss here!
After the event, all were invited to the Slack channel. You can join too!
Costs:
In terms of actual tangible costs, the whole event cost under $250!
I used Mailchimp to send out emails (sign up for our mailing list, by the way!), Google Drive/Forms for sign up, Zapier to automate some things from Google to Mailchimp, Slack for weekend communication, and Zoom for all of the virtual talks, panels & presentations.
Prior to the event, I bought a template online that I edited myself (fun fact: I’m also a web developer) and bought a domain. I already had shared hosting with a few of the other sites I run including my personal website.
Cost Breakdown:
• Mailchimp: $20
• Zapier: $50
• Zoom: $125
• Slack: free
• Google Drive: free
• Website Template: $14
• Domain Name: $25
• Website Hosting: already had
• Website SSL certificate: $8
TOTAL: $242
Labor:
Everyone, including myself, was nice enough to volunteer their time for a good cause, but if money had exchanged hands, here’s a very conservative estimate using just the US private employee average hourly rate of $30. Obviously, many of those involved charge much more than that (my hourly speaking rate, for example, is $250 an hour).
• Christine: 200 hours pre-event (Dec-Feb) + 45 hours during the event
• John: 45 hours during the event
• Speakers: 21 combined hours
• Judges: 36 combined hours
• Mentors: 102 combined hours
• Volunteers: 80 combined hours
TOTAL: 529 hours x $30 = $15,870 of free labor
(Obviously, this doesn’t take into account my post-event activities like literally typing this right now…)
Given that the speakers were majority-minority, I do not want to perpetuate the expectation that is often placed upon minorities to provide free labor, therefore; for future events, I’ll be working to figure out how to pay at a minimum, the speakers for the event, but this is a topic I’ll explore in a later post.
Feel free to copy any/all of this for your future pet project. Credit would be nice but ya know, it is what it is. ::shrug::
Thanks for reading & look out for more of these coming soon.
Thanks,
Christine