europodfriends | Entries tagged with budgeting

Some useful links for you to bookmark, and a detailed look at our budget this year, for those curious about how the EPF finances work.

Links

EPF weekend overview - Take a look at our last Dreamwidth post for a quick look at what the EPF weekend schedule and activities looks like.

Code of Conduct - Take a look at the Code of Conduct (or mark it for later).

Pitch’n’Pod guide - Refresh your memory on (or experience for the first time) the glory of Pitch’n’Pod!

Budget

( Read more... )

sylvaine

Before we get to the meat of the matter, just a quick note to let you know that Dell has stepped back as a mod for this year due to health concerns, leaving y’all with two mods running the show, Sylvie and Robin.

Next: the plan for this year is to have an in-person meet in Berlin on the weekend of October 13th - 15th, 2023! For those who have been there before, hopefully we’ll be able to rent the same place we usually do, but we shall see!

As in previous years, the meetup won’t have a flat attendance fee. We calculate the contributions based on your means, so don’t worry about not being able to afford it! And if you need extra funds to be able to attend (for travel expenses, for instance), don’t hesitate to let us know - we budget in such a way that it’s possible for europodfriends to fund your journey as well. It’s important to us to facilitate everyone’s attendance to the best of our ability.

Regarding food & drink, in 2019 we provided that for everyone out of the epf budget. We would like to be able to do that again, but that depends on how much people are able to contribute - we know the pandemic has hit a lot of us hard!

And before I forget - here’s the survey you need to fill out if you want to join us! The survey will close in one week, on February 18th, 2023.

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For those who’ve never been to an in-person EPF meetup, or who would like a little refresher, here’s roughly what we did the last times and what we’ll likely be doing this year as well:

Friday is mostly for everyone arriving, greeting each other, hanging out, and making name badges. Very ambitious people might already be podficcing that evening, but since not everyone will have arrived yet, we don’t schedule anything specific for that day.

Saturday morning there’s a meeting where everyone introduces themselves “formally” with names and pronouns. This is also when we do pitch ‘n’ pod - in short, everyone who wants to gets a few minutes to talk about a fandom and a fic in that fandom that they want to podfic at the meetup, and afterwards everyone can sign up to the podfics they want to be a part of. Saturday evening might be another scheduled event organised by attendees - in past years we’ve had a video call with Podfication, or a game of “Guess That Voice”, or watch parties, for example - but that part is up to y’all: if you want to organise something, get in touch so we can figure out the scheduling and planning!

Sunday morning we’ve done a big, fun multivoice with everyone participating the last two times, and that would certainly be fun to do again - 2018 we did Earth Is Space Australia (and Chuck Norris Isn’t A Man With A Beard. He’s A Beard With A Man) and 2019 we did I Has a Sweet Potato. After that, people start leaving as their travel plans call for.

Throughout the three days, there’s a lot of podficcing happening at all hours of day and night - the EPF collections on AO3 should give you some idea!

---------------

We know that by virtue of going back to an in-person meetup, some of you who joined us in 2020 and 2022 will not be able to come hang out with us again, which really sucks! Unfortunately we don’t have the capacity to organise a virtual meetup in addition to the in-person one, and past years show that none of us really spend a lot of time online during the weekend, so having that run parallel wouldn’t work either. However, if anyone wants to start their own virtual podfic meetup, get in touch with us! We’re happy to share our experiences with running EPF 2020 & 2022 as well as do lots of promo.

Like in the past few years, we will mostly be updating you via email, but we’ll also try to crosspost to Dreamwidth, Twitter, and tumblr, life and time permitting. If you want to make sure to stay up to date, contact us via DMs on any of the usual social medias, Discord, or email us at europodfriends at gmail to be added to the mailing list!

sylvaine

It’s rapidly nearing the end of the year, which for your mods means it’s time to start thinking about next year’s europodfriends meetup.

We’ve decided that for 2022, we would like to try to do an in-person meetup again. This means that we will once again be meeting up to hang out in Berlin on the weekend of October 14th - 16th, 2022. For those who have been there before, hopefully we’ll be able to rent the same place we usually do, but we shall see!

Considering the pandemic is still far from being over, we have decided that in order to attend you will need to provide proof you’re vaccinated against COVID-19 as well as have a current negative COVID test.

As in previous years, the meetup won’t have a flat attendance fee. We calculate the contributions based on your means, so don’t worry about not being able to afford it! And if you need extra funds to be able to attend at all (for travel expenses, for instance), don’t hesitate to let us know - we budget in such a way that it’s possible for europodfriends to fund your journey as well. It’s important to us to facilitate everyone’s attendance to the best of our ability.

Regarding food & drink, in 2019 we provided that for everyone out of the epf budget. We would like to be able to do that again, but that somewhat depends on how much people are able to contribute - we know that the pandemic has hit a lot of us hard!

Though we have yet to update these documents for the current meetup (which we'll do when we determine attendance numbers and decide on a venue), the 2019 Accessibility Information and the 2020 Code of Conduct should give you some idea of the kind of things we care about for the meetup.

And before I forget - here’s the survey you need to fill out if you (might) want to join us next year!

---------------

For those of you who’ve never been to EPF, or to an in-person meetup, or who would like a little refresher, here’s roughly what we did the last times and what we’ll likely be doing next year as well:

Friday is mostly for everyone arriving and greeting each other and hanging out and making name badges. Very ambitious people might already be podficcing that evening, but since not everyone will have arrived yet, we don’t schedule anything specific for that day.

Saturday morning there’s a meeting where everyone introduces themselves “formally” with names and pronouns. This is also when we do pitch ‘n’ pod - in short, everyone who wants to gets a few minutes to talk about a fandom and a fic in that fandom that they want to podfic at the meetup, and then afterwards everyone can sign up to the podfics they want to be a part of. Saturday evening might be another scheduled event organised by attendees - in past years we’ve had a video call with Podfication, or a game of “Guess That Voice”, or watch parties, for example - but that part is up to y’all: if you want to organise something, get in touch so we can figure out the scheduling and planning!

Sunday morning we’ve done a big, fun multivoice with everyone participating the last two times, and that would certainly be fun to do again - 2018 we did Earth Is Space Australia (and Chuck Norris Isn’t A Man With A Beard. He’s A Beard With A Man) and 2019 we did I Has a Sweet Potato. After that people start leaving again as their travel plans call for. And all throughout all three days, there’s a lot of podficcing happening at all hours of day and night - the EPF collections on AO3 should give you some idea!

---------------

We know that by virtue of going back to an in-person meetup, some of you who joined us in 2020 will not be able to come hang out with us again, which really sucks! Unfortunately we don’t have the capacity to organize a virtual meetup in addition to the in-person one, and past years show that none of us really spend a lot of time online during the weekend, so having that run parallel wouldn’t work either. However, if anyone wants to start their own virtual podfic meetup, get in touch with us! We’re happy to share our experiences with running EPF 2020 as well as do lots of promo.

Like in the past few years, we will mostly be updating you via email, but we’ll also try to crosspost to Dreamwidth, twitter, and tumblr, life and time permitting. If you want to make sure to stay up to date, contact us via DMs on any of the usual social medias or email us at europodfriends at gmail to be added to the mailing list!

frecklebombfic

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!

sylvaine

We're currently at the stage of planning our budget. If you would like to come, please fill out this form to let us know about your budget. Don't worry if you can't afford it/would need help to be able to afford the trip - we have options for that as well!

We realize this is quite early for a lot of people, so don't worry if you can't commit to staying in the Europodfriends accommodation yet - you'll still be able to attend if you find your own, separate accommodation!

We'll be closing the budget survey on the 8th of March, so make sure to fill it out until then! If you can't commit yet for sure but would like to keep abreast of things, you can follow us at here,

europodfriends, or

europodfriends. Alternatively, you can PM me your email address and I will add you to our mailing list!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us and we will do our best to answer!