How exactly does Skepticon, the nation’s largest free skeptic convention, work at all when others have to charge attendees? Starting this week we are going to be running a series of weekly articles on how Skepticon works.

Community Driven

Every penny spent came from somebody just like yourself who visited our donation page at some point, or sent us a check or handed us the money in a dark alley in person, or we spent out of our own shallow pockets. The event itself isn’t cheap either, and sometimes surprise financial obligations spring up and we beg for help.

In an effort to prevent future surprises, we are going to try and push Skepticon donations harder and earlier than ever before. Part of the fun of helping run Skepticon is that we get to be the fun, experimental convention that doesn’t mind breaking a few eggs. One of new and exciting ways to turn our visitors and community into long term financial contributors is about doing something no other convention really does. Well, that we’ve seen anyways.

Transparency

Notice the honesty about turning you into a financial contributor? That’s part of this whole transparency thing we are going to try. We are starting to utilize our web presence more and we’ll try to be more visible within the community IRL and such. Over the past couple months we’ve worked on a series of social media and website goals. Most of these won’t be interesting to you, but the important thing to keep in mind is that we are going to start pushing out more regular, informative updates to what we are doing.

Our website itself needed a redesign, and it now looks fantastic and we all love it, but more importantly it’s functional. We want to use it to try and convert more of our web traffic into the loyal Skeptonite community that spreads like a wildfire. We know that the more people visiting the site, watching past talks on YouTube and seeing Facebook posts means the more potential donors to convert to real donors.

Near future goals for site content (we’ll get to others in later posts):

• Keep this weekly feature going about how we get money, how we spend it, and how much routine things cost. This will essentially be r/mildlyinteresting material to keep you confident in where the money is going, but also serve as a “*POKE*Can you donate again? A little more?”
• Keep our fun Skepticon Facebook active and use it to draw attendee stories we can use for a future weekly feature. We have a lot of site traffic from people who haven’t attended a prior Skepticon and this will hopefully suck them in.
• Keep our Skepticake feature in our weekly lineup. Dropping links to potential speakers and checking to see if anyone is interested, but also getting you excited about things you might have missed in our awesome community.

Feedback

We would definitely like feedback about all of this from you. We want to know what you want to hear about, what you want to know about Skepticon and how it’s produced. Want to know how much those sweet chairs you loved so much in the main hall set us back? Also, if you believe conferences on whole should remain a Man Behind a Curtain, we want to know that too.