europodfriends | Budget: Contributions & Donations

An explainer about the way Europodfriends handles finances, the difference between accommodation contributions and donations, and why we start by asking what your budget is, rather than just telling you how much the cost of accommodation is.

Proportional pricing
The EPF mods, Sylvie and Dell, decided at the start to prioritise making attendance as accessible as possible to the greatest number of people. One way we’re doing this is by pricing accommodation proportionally to everyone’s budget, instead of just dividing the total cost by the number of attendees.

We ask everyone for the amount they’re comfortable contributing, and then once we have a total budget from the whole group, we use the proportion of each person’s budget which covers the group’s accommodation expenses. In 2018 we asked people for 70% of the accommodation budget they gave us. In 2019 we asked for 81% of people’s accommodation budget and 77% of people’s donation budget (2019 was the first year we both asked for and used a donation budget).

As the final amounts are completely dependent on how much everyone's individual budget is, we can't guarantee how much we will ask for each time, but we're putting these numbers here in the name of transparency.

Accommodation contributions
The accommodation contributions are what we use to pay for the Europodfriends apartment.

Once signups close, we work out the whole group’s budget, and individual contributions, based on the number of people attending at that time, and then book the accommodation. Anyone who cancels from that date onward has no guarantee of getting their contribution back. They may get some of their contribution back if their place is filled by a person on the waitlist, or if they can find another person to take their place.

(We rely on attendees to pay us their contribution in decent time, so that the mods aren’t shouldering the cost of the whole apartment for a long period of time.)

Donations
We use the donations budget to make attendance accessible to a greater number of people. Financial accessibility is a barrier we can help with, so we make the donation budget available to people who wouldn’t be able to attend without financial help.

We also use this budget to pay for consumables used during the EPF weekend, like: staple foods for the group, name and pronoun badges, stationery used during group activities (things like Pitch & Pod or Spot That Voice).

Let us know if you have any questions about our budget and finances after reading this post!