🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <chris.700873961@suite.sw.oz.au> chris@suite.sw.oz.au (Chris Maltby) writes:
>Ray (and the rest of the membership)
>
>Those figures sure look like a worry. I think the membership can guess
>how I paid off my house so quick (:-).
>
>Actually, the cost of the venue is an important one, but not for the
>obvious reason. The AUUG conference and exhibition is actually run
>(mostly for historical reasons now) as two separate events. ACMS, the
>organiser, run the exhibition and contribute a share of the takings
>to AUUG. AUUG runs the conference and pays ACMS to administer it.
>ACMS certainly turn over a fair amount of money in the whole affair,
>but their expenses are more than just a few petit-fours also.

I already understand this, maybe it is this arrangement that should
be reconsidered, I cannot however make any assumptions as to whether
this would be a good idea without better numbers from the AUUG.
These numbers seem to be very difficult to extract, but some were
given in the latest AUUGN, i.e 499 conference attendees and 1902
square metres of exhibition space SOLD.
If these numbers are wrongs then I guess you will have to reject the
minutes of the 9 December 1991 meeting.

>The lettable area for the exhibition isn't the whole hall.

I understand this, exhibition hall 5 is 5000 square metres, of which
1902 square metres was reportedly sold at a rate of $300,
this was from the memory of the current treasurer. Why
aren't these numbers more public?

>Revenue from stands at AUUG90 (I can't find my AUUG91 report) was
>a total of $220K - Total exhibiton revenue being $260k.
>Expenses, including hire of partitions, assembly etc accounted for
>$145K total, and AUUG got $60K of the remainder (a formula based on
>exhibition vs sponsorship). ACMS used the rest ($85K) for funding their
>contribution to the thing - maybe they made $30K profit if they were
>lucky.
I have no knowledge of the costs of the 1990 venue, so I would not
want to comment, I do however have the publically available
costings of the Darling Harbour Conference and Exhibition Centre,
and they do not seem to validate the "Darling Harbour is very expensive"
conjecture, particularly in view of the AUUGN published revenue
numbers.

>On the conference side, revenue from delegates was $155K. Expenses
>(at the Melbourne world trade centre) were $173K before considering
>costs of invited speakers. Per delegate expenses (cocktails, dinner,
>lunches, proceedings, etc) account for about 80% of the conference
>revenue. The result for AUUG after adding the return from the
>exhibition was a modest $20K after accounting for airfares,
>accomodation etc for speakers.

I don't want to see gross numbers like $173k, I want to see the
break down of costs in terms of:
cost of venue: $X
cost of dinner: $Y
cost of refreshments: $Z
cost of proceedings .....
then I will expect that the sum of the XYZ = $173k.

I will agree, as will your auditors that $-173k + $155k + $exhibition
= $20k, but that is not the point, it is how these gross numbers
were achieved that needs attention.

>The result for 1991 was a break even because of additional expenses
>for venue hire, marketing (dare I say it), the speaker services,
>a loss on the harbour cruise etc. In other words, there's no rip off
>going on.

Let me see the numbers.

>Some contructive suggestions might be:
>
>    cut the sit down lunch, in favour of boxes or buy-it-yourself
>    though the lunch is perhaps the best occasion for delegates
>    to mix.
>
>    focus the marketing expenditure better (this is in hand)
>
>    negotiate a better deal with ACMS - will you help Ray?
>
>Any others? (and let's be contstructive please)

Sure, let me see the numbers and I will be happy to comment in full
on constructive ways to make the conference perform in terms of users
needs, but this can't be done without knowing the ins and outs of the
funding of the winter conference.
You will probably need to start with a clean slate in terms of the
way the Winter conference is run to do much better than
it is donw currently. I don't want to jump the gun with suggestions
without having all the necessary information.