The Convergence 7 Budget

We plan to add refinements and details over the coming months. Extended commentary follows the table below.

C7 Total Income	$53,760
C7 Total Debts	$66,390
Advanced Ticket Sales	$50,400
Bands	$19,200
Irving Plaza Rental (Both Nights)	$12,660
Warwick Conference Spaces	$12,000
Irving Plaza Bar Guarantee (Both Nights)	$8,000
Roxy Ballroom Rental	$7,500
Roxy Ballroom Bar Guarantee	$5,000
Warwick Lodging Expenses	$3,740
Booklet Printing	$3,140
T-Shirt Printing	$2,000
CPN Chargeback Fees	$1,900
Village Voice	$1,830
CPN Payment	$720
Audio/Music Equipment Rental	$690
Goodie Bag Misc	$260
Flyer Printing	$230
Cyberfaerie Ball Admissions	$200
Band Catering	$200
DJ Backup Equipment & Cables	$100
Laminate Supplies	$100
Artwork (Expediting Fee)	$100
Fort Tryon Park Permit Applcation	$30

Erica's Warwick Conference Spaces Estimate (A)	$10,000
Angelica's Warwick Conference Spaces Estimate (B)	$16,000
Final Warwick Conference Spaces Total (C)	$12,000
Original Tentative Band Budget	$20,000
Final Band Budget	$19,200
Original Printing Budget	$2,000
Final Printing Budget	$3,140

Comments

During the C7 election, we suggested total public financial disclosure to a notable former Convergence organizer. This person objected to the idea, partially on the grounds that it might set a poor precedent for future Convergences and that it could put Convergence as an institution on shaky legal footing. It was because of this advice that we did not publicize the details of our finances previously, and it is only because of public interest that we are opening our books following the conclusion of the event.

Ticket Sales:

Convergence 7 sold 733 tickets before August 13th, through the online ticketing system and mail-in and PayPal ticketing. We sold an additional ten tickets at the event itself— these tickets were all for people who had attempted to purchase admission in advance. They were not off-the-street ticket sales.

An additional 50 tickets were sold to one of the band representatives, as part of their contract negotiations. This became an extended guest list for the band. These attendees were never entered into the ticketing system and, as such, do not have Convergence voting privileges (unless, of course, if they were able to vote last year, or they mail-in their voter registration).

71% of those who purchased admission prior to August 13th requested net.goth affiliation tags such as alt.gothic, alt.gothic.fashion, corpgoth, etc., on their laminates. From this, we believe that C7 had one of the largest proportional attendance by net.goths of any Convergence.

Band Budget:

You read it right— we actually made it below our allocated band budget! Our budget for bands started at $20,000 in the days following the C7 election, and we never went over this amount at any point, despite including some pretty high-caliber bands. Being that our original budget was based on 1,000 attendees, our band budget was roughly 30% of our total budget— similar in proportion to that of Convergence 6 (as far as we know from the C6 budget shared with us previously).

Irving Plaza Rental:

We received an employee discount of roughly $3,000 through the assistance of Jen Ellerson. Relative to our other expenses, this probably is not substantial, but Irving Plaza does not casually discount rentals by this much. We owe a tip of the hat to Bill Brusca (Irving Plaza General Manager) and the rest of the Irving Plaza team for being consummate professionals, and thereby ensuring that Convergence 7's concerts came to fruition as planned.

Bar Guarantees:

One of the standard policies at NYC nightclubs (and in many other cities) is the bar guarantee. In addition to paying the rental fees for the nightclub, the promoter is contractually responsible for the nightclub's bar making a minimum profit in drink sales by the end of the night. If the crowd drinks insufficiently, the promoter must pay the difference.

We estimated that we'd make about 50% of our bar guarantee over the Convergence 7 weekend, which meant that we needed at least an additional $6,500 available to pay back the bars, and as much as 75% ($9,700) to be really safe. Since we only knew the potential range of these costs to be paid at the end of the night, these items are marked in blue in the table above. If turnout on any night was low, or people chose to drink elsewhere (Limelight, Downtime, or even at the hotel), we'd potentially run out of credit halfway through the weekend. This is a risk any medium-to-large club night or concert in NYC runs, except that this was complicated by the fact that Convergence is a multi-day event.

New York City goths are notoriously stingy at the club bars, whereas the typical Convergence crowd is very much the opposite. Concert venue drink prices in NYC are higher than many areas of the USA, and people used to $3 shots might have balked at $6 shots (for example). These issues, combined with the "alternative events" factor, made us a little anxious to see how the bar would do on each night.

Much to our relief, we made our bar guarantee every night of Convergence, and one of our major hurdles was completely and happily resolved, thanks to our wonderful attendees.

Warwick Conference Spaces:

The original estimate from our second Hotel Liaison (Erica Jantos) was just over $10,000. After Erica left the project, we were told by the Warwick Catering Manager (Angelica) that the previous estimate was far from complete, and the actual cost would be around $16,000. After some last-minute renegotiations with the Warwick, we were able to get this down to $12,000. We owe much gratitude to Angelica for being so understanding and accommodating under the circumstances.

Booklet Printing:

Our original estimate for printing was a little over $2,000. Because of a number of last-minute edits related to our itinerary text and a number of file format problems, we missed our submission deadline by one day and the printer charged us a surprising $1,000 penalty.

CPN Chargeback Fees:

A number of people were confused by the Convergence 7 ticket appearing on their credit card statement as coming from Crystal Palace Networking, a family-run ISP that offered to set up online sales for a nominal fee.

When several ticketholders disputed the charges, the credit card processing service refunded their money and then penalized Crystal Palace Networking enormous penalties for percieved fraudulent orders. CPN and the C7 Staff are trying to get precise numbers out of the mountains of confusing paperwork this produced, but it appears that CPN was hit with a $140 penalty on top of the actual refund amount, for every single false fraud report.

Even more troubling than this, most of these same individuals came to Convergence 7 Registration and collected packages, as the credit card processing service did not provide the identities of those who made fraud reports in a timely manner. Technicalities aside; each of these people smugly stole an average of $70 from Convergence 7, $140 from the family who run CPN by way of penalties, and attended Convergence 7 for free as a result.