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Another easy way to reduce the price: cut stuff people don’t actually need.
The first is free alcohol at parties. Everyone is aware that they are either a) paid by a sponsor or b) cross-financed through their ticket anyways. If you tell that to people most think that this hurts your event, it actually doesn’t. People will happily buy their own stuff or appreciate that they didn’t fund someone elses drinks. We allow sponsors to foot the bill at parties, but only if they are a regular sponsor first.
Another is cutting parties completely. They are appreciated but not as important as they seem. I figured that out at the first conference we ran, we just didn’t have any serious budget to rent a venue or a club. We sidetracked the issue by finding locations around the venue where people can go and had people from the local community bring them there. We also called ahead to make sure the places know they might get a lot of customers. Turns out: general feedback was good. Most attendees don’t spend the evening with more then 10 people. Why not around a table at a pizzeria instead of in a club with loud music? Or why not in a club with loud music, but without all those eating patrons around? :) Again, the first reaction here was “impossible”, but we are doing it ever since. This year, we found out that on our Saturday evening, the film studio where the Wachowsky brothers filmed a lot of films has an open night :D.
All those things are nice perks, but if they are the core of your technology event, there is something wrong with your event.
In the end: replacing things that cost money by people doing some work sits well with crowds going to community events. Asking local community members to just adopt a group and go out in town is a very inexpensive, but appreciated strategy.
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Shirts are a bit problematic, sometimes they are more of a barter with the sponsors ;). They might expect it. Also, they are part of selling yourself for next year. “Hey, you were there, how was it?” is great. Still, if you want to drive ticket costs down, this is another way to go.
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I’d love to understand why this has been marked as spam; I’m relatively new to this community, but my hope was that it would be relevant to at least some of the people here? Apologies if this wasn’t the case.
It read much like advertising, with no real information. There is a wealth of research on this topic, and the post covered none of it; indeed, half of the only point of concrete advice the post gives (deindividuate everyone in your team) does not work and is evil.
Tl;dr this read like someone shilling for a consultancy that makes its money through helping management fuck over programmers.
Now, this may not be what was meant in the post; if that is the case, I would suggest it be rewritten entirely.