Report and Data for EAGxAustralia 2023

We are proud to release the retrospective report (click here for google doc) and analysis of the EAGxAustralia 2023 conference. We spent a lot of time collating information that we hope will be of use to event organisers throughout the EA community. Here we provide a brief summary of some of the information found in our report:

• Detailed breakdown of committee time taken to perform different tasks.
• Detailed demographic breakdown of attendees and speakers.
• Data for the number of applications received by week in the leadup to the conference.
• Data for attendence at different conference sessions, including corroboration between Swapcard registrations and manual headcounts.
• Detailed breakdown of budget expenditures.
• Detailed discussion of program design considerations and challenges.
• Breakdown of ticket sales aned travel grants by amount.
• Catering data of all food purchased and how much was actually eaten per person.
• Detailed list of all inventory items required including quantities, and discussion of what was actually used.
• Discussion of our $6000 social media marketing program, including registration funnel and data regarding cost per lead and per approved applicant.
• Breakdown of merchandise purchases, including costs and quantities left over.
• Attendence estimates for evening social events.
• Quantitiative and qualitative analysis of attendee feedback.

Our introductory summary with key measures is reproduced below:

EAGxAustralia 2023 was held at the University of Melbourne from the 22nd-24th September 2023. We received a total of 361 applications, of which 317 were accepted. Final attendance was 279, including a total of 56 invited speakers. Average likelihood to recommend score was 8.63/10, with an average of 7.31 new connections reported per attendee. The direct financial outlay for the event was about $160,000 AUD, or $200,000 AUD when adding travel grants and deducting revenue from ticket sales. This yields a total cost per connection of $63 USD, which compares favourably to the average cost per connection of EAGx conferences in 2022 of $152 USD.

We are very proud of our achievement of organising a high-impact conference conference on a low budget. We would like to thank the entire organising committee and all those who supported our work, including Ollie and Ivan from CEA.

                                                                                                               James Fodor and Vanessa Sarre