Image by AmcePhoto via Flickr

Another part of my Year End Clear Out related to Ignite Phoenix, a few of the reasons things work as they do related to the event. My normal approach is not to air a lot of the internal stuff and just let people enjoy the show, but many people have been generally curious or offered other approaches so thought I would share how things are viewed.

Most of these are decisions by the Ignite Phoenix team, who I’ll encourage to chime in here, as not every one of us agrees with every approach. Most of these topics at least come up once each cycle to see if we need to modify it. None are set in stone, though a few of them I feel much more strongly about than others.

I’m going to try and be concise – a challenge for me as I’m getting my blog-legs back – and I can expound if anyone has questions.

Size of the event

500-600 people is as large as we want Ignite to get. We could fill larger venues, but then it becomes more attractive to sales-pitches and scarier to average people who want to give it a try. It also becomes harder to really interact with presenters during breaks with this many people. If it ever got so big that there was no benefit to going in person to meet the speakers, we would have lost something important.

Multimedia presentations

We keep a hard line on static slides without music or video. We’ve made an exception for music a few times (Ignites #1 and #4 come to mind)  but Ignite should be about a person sharing their idea personally, not taking time to show something prebuilt. As a bonus, this simplifies the tech issues enormously, but the core reason is to force the presenter to be the center of the talk.

Props & teams during presentations

We discourage this heavily for the same reasons as above, but have made some exceptions like with music. It has to be integral to the talk. Done right the slides are prop enough, but many people don’t use them as effectively as they could.

Exceptions

We try to do 90% of the work by general rules we’ve set, but are always willing to consider exceptions. Nearly every Ignite has had at least one talk that has been non-standard in some way. We’d be stupid to leave out a great talk just because it was a little different.

Private voting

Ignite should never be a popularity contest. Some people already get very upset when their idea isn’t selected, and we don’t want to make that worse. We keep the process public but the votes private. Perhaps one of the few absolute rules we have is that judges cannot disclose anything about the voting results.

Why Wasn’t My Presentation Chosen?

I hate this question, but get it every time. Since I don’t pick the presentations, I really can’t answer it. Sometimes it is just the way the voting falls, sometimes we just get a lot of submissions on one topic and it splits the votes. Often times the difference between the 18th (Made It) and 19th (Missed) presentation votes are a fraction of a percent. One time we had about 6 all clumped together, so often times it just becomes a lack of space. We encourage people to resubmit, but very few do.

Three Times In Tempe?

We hadn’t planned to stay in Tempe for a full year (Ignites 3-5) but we made an agreement with sponsors back during Ignite Phoenix 3 and wanted to honor them. Overall Tempe was very hospitable to use – the vast majority of the problems we had were related to the venue itself.  Our plan now is to move around the Valley quite a bit more, but may still revisit venues if it makes sense.  We don’t want to be in one location for a full year again.

Involvement & Input

Holy crap, SO many people work to make Ignite happen, from the core team that meets for a few weeks leading up to it, to the volunteers who help the night of the event. We welcome anyone to jump in and grab a role and put their stamp on it, but we give preference to people who are really involved. We watch a lot of the general community feedback and take it to heart, but sometimes topics are a lot more complex (and sometimes stupid) than people realize so we don’t always react to public comments. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve invited someone to devote hours to make a change they proposed and they are never heard from again.

Wifi

Having wifi is a priority for us in all future venue selections, or at least not having a venue that blocks 3G and cell connections. Many people use their phones and other devices to tweet and connect during the events, so wifi may not be a deal breaker. We want people to be able to share and talk about the presenters on the back channel, and believe me – our frustration on this topic may exceed that of any attendee to date.

Charging for Tickets

As Ignite grew, managing the tickets against reservations became a real challenge for our volunteers. Ignite #4 used Eventbrite and the reservations came through to us very spotty. Plus, no-shows on the free reservations were nearly 40%. It turned that out since the tickets were free, people just reserved a bunch even if they weren’t sure they could come. (I’ve learned since then this is a common issue that events face.

If we have a venue box office do it, they charge a handling fee we can’t get around. Our solution for #5 was to set a price ($5) that ate the fee, gave us some revenue, and set the bar just high enough that people wouldn’t grab tickets unless they were fairly sure they would come.  It worked much better, but shifted the problem to the 100 free tickets we held back to give away that night – people heard we were “sold out” so didn’t drive down to claim them.

To be crystal clear on a related point, nobody makes a profit on Ignite. Nobody draws a salary or is in any way directly compensated for their time. All money – from sponsors and tickets – goes to pay the expenses tied to the event.  Money coming in from tickets just helps reduce our need for getting sponsors. Ignite still costs money to put on.

Our plan for Ignite #6 is to put all tickets on sale, except for the free ones that sponsors and presenters receive. We think this is the best balance between reducing load on our volunteers, and ensuring that anyone who wants to attend that evening can plan accordingly without having to show up way in advance to wait in line.

Mini-Ignites

There have been several topic specific, mini-Ignites over the past year, with the most notable being the Intel sponsored Developer Ignite, and the Ignite High School hosted by Carl Hayden High School.  We love these, and our hope is to have a few more of them each year, but not a flood so it overwhelms people.

We ask that some basic rules be followed, mostly around transparency, and that we cross-promote, but then let the mini-Ignite find its own style and voice. I think this is a great way to leverage the brand of Ignite Phoenix, and have new ideas and methods feed back into the overall event.  I love having the mini-Ignites have a different look and feel, and I hope to see a few more of these in 2010.

Blah blah blah…

Well, I still seriously suck on the brevity angle.  I held this back to try and edit it, but these are really all questions I get. It seemed dumb to make a series about it, so I’ll just put them all out there and discuss any that people find interesting.  I still have a post in mind about how to improve Ignite, which hopefully I’ll still get out this week.

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