Approaches to Community Building
Example prices, as set for a small conference of approximately 500:
- Green Travel including ride, room and flight matching as needed (
$500 )
- Ambassador Programs ( $750, $1000 including Green Travel )
- Online Discussion Forums ( $1750, $2000 including Green Travel,
$2250 including Ambassador, $2500 for all 3 services )
- Conference Standard Web Design ( negotiable )
Prices increase slowly for larger conferences, in part based on
expected tech support needs.
Quick introduction to available services:
Green Travel: Ride, Room and/or Flight
Connections
Provide your attendees with the opportunity to save resources and make
connections during their travels. We'll customize any combination
of
carpool, room-share, home-stay,
flight-match, airport taxi and car-rental matching, as needed for your
event and based on the schedule of your event, into an online interface
and database.
Ambassador
Programs; Mentor and Peer Matching
Match first time attendees and people new to your field with
"conference mentors" who will introduce them to the issues and people
at your conference. For ambassadors, this can be a first step in
transforming from being just an attendee to embracing leadership roles
within your community. Matching is based on both interests and
geography, and people can match ambassador to first-time attendee or
peer to peer.
Structured Online Forums
We build and host a bulletin board for you, often combined with
consultation on structuring both the agenda and the online tools so
that attendees can become participants. Attendees can introduce
themselves online, form groups based on both their interests and
geographical community, and ask questions or write replies concerning
the issues of the conference. Speakers can introduce their topics
in
greater detail, read questions beforehand, and continue to interact
afterwards.
Conference Web Design
SpaceShare's focus is functionality and community building. Our
standard conference web design package includes everything you need to
run a well connected community-building conference: a content
management
system so that you can easily edit your own pages, simple registration,
green travel, online discussion forums and/or blogs. Content is
completely customizable, and web design is kept simple but includes
your logo and color-scheme. Beyond our standard package,
SpaceShare is
part of the Nonprofit Technology Center and works with a wide array of
other designers as needed.
Services and Pricing
We provide customized attendee-connection services to a wide variety of
events, focused on but not limited to ridesharing and other sharing.
Given this variety, there is no easy formula to describe appropriate services and pricing.
It's easiest for us to talk,
discuss the best approach for your event, and then we will
generally commit to a set cost. This page provides an overview.
Green Travel to Conferences and Festivals
The following services are included under the Green Travel package,
priced at $500 for a small conference with hundreds of attendees.
This includes:
- Customizing any combination of carpool, room-share, home-stay,
flight-match, airport taxi and car-rental matching, as needed for your
event and based on the schedule of your event, into an online interface
and database.
- Providing outreach advice to encourage your attendees to use the
system, and to make you look good for being green. We have
templates
for web announcements, email articles, and other ways to talk about
running a green, community event. We're happy to help adjust them
to
the themes of your event (e.g., "protect the
earth" or "travel with your neighbors to build community" or "our
conference is providing you a new way to network"), or the
colors of your materials.
- Personalized tech support, and reminder check-ins for users where
we offer to help if they are having problems, and feedback for you
after the event. The website is just the tool: we're here to help your
attendees connect and conserve.
- Simple design modifications, such as your logo and/or that of a
sponsor you choose, and basic color changes.
- In some cases, we provide publicity such as your card posted at
other event.
Festivals
Festivals typically focus much more on carpooling, rather than the full suite
of services, and in our experience require less technical support. Prices
typically vary between $500 for a smaller festival to $1000 for a typical
larger
festival: our pricing is complicated because there are a wide variety
of factors that tremendously impact expected use, beyond simply the size.
In many cases, especially in Northern California, we exchange our work for open sponsorships, and then
search for an underwriter. Please contact us to discuss this option.
Alternative Payment or Exchange
SpaceShare was founded to help people be green. But most of our
clients are nonprofits, amazing but low budget organizations, and we
do need to keep SpaceShare itself sustainable.
Our approach: low budget events, such as a ticketless EarthDay celebration,
are welcome to help our
mission in non-cash ways while we help your event:
- Sponsorships that can be underwritten, especially in Northern
California. This is especially appropriate for music festivals
that use a sponsorship model.
You provide sponsorship benefits, and we do our best to find a sponsor who will underwrite our work in exchange for those benefits. We often work
with Columbia Gorge Organic Juice, for example.
- Connect us with green businesses who would like to sponsor
other events that we work with.
- Provide committed volunteer hours to accomplish one of the tasks
for SpaceShare's festival team. SpaceShare's work greening festivals
involves a team of volunteers, and we often need artists, designers and
creative work. This is an appopriate fair-exchange for events such
as environmental rallies, for example designing graphics or
videos for environmental
education.
Small Event Note
SpaceShare's tools are always customized, and are designed for events
large enough to require sorting of attendees. We do not yet have tools
(free or otherwise) designed for small events. We'd love to partner
with an organization, or help an individual get started, providing
simpler carpool tools for smaller events!
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