Congress voucher distribution

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Every year there's the Chaos Communication Congress, and every year we receive some pre-sale vouchers via contact@techinc.nl . This page is a bit of a dump on how to distribute this to members.

Years before COVID19

Replicating voucher system. Public list where people added themselves and passed them to the next one, e.g.:

37c3

Not replicating voucher systems, each hackerspace got one voucher valid for X tickets (for us it looks like the amount we asked for ~40). Board made a poll, everyone who answered was sent the voucher, everyone was happy.

38c3

Replicating vouchers again (https://tickets.events.ccc.de/38c3/docs/).

Replicating voucher mechanism details

Stuff that's not easily findable:

We provide estimates of how many people we expect want to go to CCC (39 this year). Then, they send us 1 voucher per ~10 people. 1 voucher allows to buy 1 ticket, and provide an email address for the next voucher. Every day at 22:00, each voucher that has been paid for more than 24h will generate another voucher sent to the provided email address. I.e. vouchers replicate every 2 days, except the week-ends, faster for the initial batch (or sometimes at random), unless phase 1 pool runs out.

How we did it

Board quickly reused the poll from last year as a starting point for the estimates.

Some concerns against reusing the previous system:

  • Board didn't feel had the capacity to coordinate the whole thing (questions, putting people in contact, ensuring vouchers don't get stuck...)
  • Lots of new people that didn't participate in the previous sytem, nor a lot of people who did to help the new ones
  • Doubts as to whether members would know each other to send the voucher
  • Not willing to make members contact info publicly available (and didn't ask if it would be ok to share details in the poll)
  • Misunderstanding of how the old system worked (did ask though)

Frogeye quickly whipped up a mailing list with poll respondants where vouchers would circulate back. Expectedly chaotic (mini open-sale with barely known time every day), unexpectedly added more load on them to figure out where missing vouchers where.

Noah stepped up to change the system to a private list based on poll answers, and would be the one to distribute the vouchers individually, answering questions, late additions, handling desistments and non-responding members, reordering as needed, sending regular updates.

Takeaways

Frogeye:

  • Start asking for people whether they want to go before we get the modus operandi blogpost (people only got 3 days to fill the form, many late answers)
  • Inflating the estimate by 5 from the actual poll answer for the estimate due to above was good, but a bit tight for the schedule

Noah:

  • we should ask for people's phone numbers in the sign-up form
  • no complaints about sorting the ranking based on form submission order, with direct entries going first, then people's +1's, then +2's, etc
    • however, it is unclear how this should interact together with adding people to the ranking when people are asking to be added afterwards
  • people often think they are doing a favour by asking to be put further back on the list, unaware of the administartive pain that this causes
  • using a custom replication address for voucher seems to be a good idea. I never ended up needing to use it to debug issues, but it gave me a big piece of mind.
  • people were much quicker to claim vouchers near the start vs the end. I have a few hypothisis as to how that could be:
    • people near the start were also the ones to first submit the forms, and therefore generally had the quickest reaction speeds
    • people near the start were also the ones to first submit the forms, and highest desire to go to CCC
    • people near the start all needed vouchers for themselves, and which thus required no further communication
  • when telling someone that the voucher has been passed on to someone else, make it very explicit that they may not use the voucher anymore. we had one person still claiming it after I told them I would give it to someone else
  • people don't read
  • only 45% of the original list ended up buying a ticket via us. 21% asked to be removed (because they got a voucher elsewhere or didn't want to go), 24% was too indecisive for too long, and 9% failed to buy a ticket after being given one
  • asking people to confirm if their +1's still want to go before sending one is a good idea, but asking people to confirm they can claim the vouchers for their friends was probably too confusing and not worth it.
  • we should probably make the voucher list public next time. this allows us to spread out the work more, and allows us to be more flexible with changing people's positions without needing to send out tons of emails to inform people of their new positions.
  • while using templates for the emails is a good idea, I should focus more on keeping them as short as possible, and natural-sounding. people are more likely to respond if they think I hand-authored their email
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