Selling Tickets

tl;dr: WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. tickets should cost $25 USD/person/day (or less) and include lunch and a piece of swag. Offer scholarships/discounts so money doesn’t keep anyone out.

Setting Ticket Prices

In utopia (or Paris), WordCamps would all be free, like WordPress itself. In reality, though, when an event is free, a lot of people sign up and then when the day comes they might change their mind, forget, or just want to sleep in. A small ticket cost provides incentive for people who’ve registered to show up on the day. Why does this matter? As WordCamps get bigger, they sell out, and people who wish they could attend are turned away in favor of the early birds. If the early birds don’t show up, you wind up with empty spaces that could have been filled by the late-wishers.

We think of WordCamp tickets not as being comparable to conference tickets (for many WordCamp lineups, you’d have to pay hundreds of dollars at a regular conference), but as being just enough to get people out of bed on that sleepy WordCamp morning. Typical prices run about $20-25 USD per day, which basically covers lunch and a t-shirt, leaving you to cover the additional event costs through fundraising. If you think you need to charge more than $25 USD per day, chances are there’s something going on your budget that can be adjusted. Want more information? Check out The Reasons Behind.

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Comp and Discount Tickets

There are some situations in which tickets should be free or discounted. All your speakers are donating their time and should be given comped tickets. Likewise, your organizing team and the volunteers usually get comped tickets. That said, if you have a very active meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. group and everyone is volunteering or speaking, that doesn’t leave anyone to buy tickets! In some cases it makes more sense to have the volunteers get a discount or comped ticket only if a certain number of hours have been put in. Some WordCamps don’t comp any tickets at all, including speakers, if they have kept them priced very low, which is another way to go.

WordCamp ticket prices are usually so low that the idea of giving them away almost seems silly. You are more than likely to get requests for free admission, though! People will ask for press passes, courtesy passes, cross-promotion passes. In many industries, this is standard procedure, so don’t be afraid to say no to these requests. Press passes are tricky because if WordPress democratizes publishing, who’s to say which sites are worthy of being considered “press” and getting free passes? That said, if a high-profile news site offers to liveblog your event, produce stories about the event/speakers/WordPress leading up to and/or after the event, or conduct interviews among speakers and attendees that can be uploaded to wordpress.tv, then you could just consider them event volunteers.

Scholarships are a little different. The IRS likes us to have scholarships, as part of the Foundation’s educational mission. Again, the typical ticket prices are so low this seems unnecessary, but we like to do it one way or another. Some events knock off $10 for students and teachers, some have a scholarship application and give away a set number of free passes based on need, some offer free passes in exchange for volunteering. These are all reasonable approaches, just be sure to have a plan in place for making attendance possible for low-income people.

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Online Ticket Sales

WordCamp.org sites currently use the CampTix pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party to sell tickets (and provide comp tickets to sponsors, speakers, and organizers/volunteers using a coupon code). This allows you to accept Stripe, PayPal, and other gateways to charge credit/debit cards. The only fees are from those that the gateways collect (typically about 3%).

You can use the ticketing plugin to get additional information from your attendees as well, such as shirt size and dietary restrictions. Instructions for how to use the plugin are available on Using CampTix Event Ticketing Plugin.

Please include a refund policy on your registration page, saying that refunds are only available within 60 days of any ticket purchase, or declaring that refunds will not be available if you decide not to give refunds.

Please also include a copy of your Recording Policy on the registration page. Here’s an example:

For community-building and promotional purposes, there will be volunteer and/or professional photographers and videographers at the WordCamp event. By attending the event, you consent to your image being used in resulting photos or videos that may show your participation in the WordCamp.

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Walk-in Ticket Sales

Some events close registration a day or two before the event so they can print out things like registration lists and name badges in advance rather than doing it the night before your WordCamp. Whether you do this or not, you may want to sell walk-in tickets. You can accept cash, obviously, but can also ask us to loan you an iPad with a Square reader so that you can take credit cards at the door. Many WordCamps charge a little more for walk-in tickets since those people were not accounted for when planning food, shirts, etc., while others charge the same price. Either approach is fine, but if you do charge more, it shouldn’t be more than an extra $5/day.

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The Reasons Behind pricing tickets as low as possible:

How does this benefit the WordCamp?

It doesn’t, necessarily. More revenue could definitely help ease WordCamp organizing. But keep reading…

How does this benefit our local community?

Like WordPress is free (and priceless), it would be great if WordCamps were free. But when you provide free tickets, you usually end up with 800 people registered and only 200 people showing up on the day of the event, which means you’ve wasted a lot of money for nothing. So we charge as little as possible while still enough that people who’ve registered actually show up.

Extremely affordable tickets allow everyone in your community to attend WordCamp, lowering the barrier to entry for attendance as much as humanly possible. This helps build your community, as people who might not be able to afford higher ticket prices can join in and share their experiences with WordPress. A large community with diverse perspectives is good for local events and activities.

How does this benefit the WordPress project?

Unless we only want people with a certain amount of money using WordPress, financially accessible events also enrich the larger WordPress project.

Need ideas to boost ticket sales? Look no further than the useful comments in this blog post.

Here is a quiz on this article. Read quizzes page if you have any questions about quizzes and how to navigate them.

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