Community Conference Organizer Checklist

Not-for-profit (or for charity), quite opinionated. From experience organizing and witnessing the organization of meet.js Summit with small crews.

Might not work for conference sizes above a few hundred attendees.

Early

Find a venue.
Find a date without collisions with other events for matching target group.
Book the date (preferably in a way you can cancel at no cost for a month or so).
Start recruiting sponsors as soon as you have the date and an estimate on attendee count.

Humans 🙋

Choose someone who can fully replace you in case of emergency.
Get people on board first and make the final decision to start organizing together.
Have someone on the team who disagrees with you on some things (except fundamental values).
Set up a communication channel that's easy to access from anywhere.
Choose someone to care for the social media presence. Preferably a person least likely to make an offensive joke.
Choose someone to handle communication with speakers and all their arrangements. This person should also be involved in the CFP.

Money 💰

Make a list of minimal expenses required for the event to happen at all (see 1).
Build a sponsor offer document (see 2).
Carefully decide what you want to offer.
Have a significantly more expensive main sponsor offer.
Prepare something for the sponsors that weren't the first to grab main sponsor but could afford it - a big party sponsor, a workshop day sponsor etc.
Find a charity that can handle selling tickets (you don't touch the money, they get it all).

1 Minimum Viable Conference

You're taking on a risk. So even if you can expect plenty of sponsors, it's worth considering what's the least you can achieve to be able to call it a success. Here's what I think is the minimum viable conference.

Venue for free - you can do it. Also check if you can get an inexpensive venue where participants can buy their own lunch. That's even better. With ticket money going to charity you can count on help from local government and many other institutions. University lecture halls are also an option.
Need to provide coffee/tea/water buffet for attendees.
Accommodation for speakers who can't get it from their company.
Figure out a way to let participants buy food for themselves without too much hassle.
Need to print badges and basic stuff like agenda posters.

Organizing the MVC could cost less than your main sponsor package, so you only need to score one ;)

Food and drinks tend to be the biggest cost. If you get a venue from an institution for free, it's your only large cost really. Sometimes it's also possible to get a commercial venue for free if your attendees buy lunch there.

If you want to include food in your minimum, look into getting large sandwiches or tortilla wraps. Sidenote: this option is not OK if you sell expensive tickets or keep any of the ticket money

2 Sponsor offer

Build it in a way you can send it as a file attachment to an email.
Name the event.
Give details on when, where, how long.
Describe the event, focus on attendees profile and topics covered.
Explain the benefits of sponsoring the event.
Take all the above and rewrite it to be 50% shorter.
List sponsor packages, costs and benefits in them (in a table, like on a pricing page).
Give details on the booths size, electricity available, chairs, tables, etc..
Explain that booth locations will be chosen in the order of payments coming in (it works!).
Put contact info at the beginning and the end.
Make sure it looks professional.
Be ready to respond to questions about technical details you already put in the document, send a summary in another email to all sponsors that confirm participation. They tend not to go back to the document once they decide to sponsor.

Preparations

Create a CRM for managing sponsors - contacts and statuses (online spreadsheet is fine)
Get all the contacts you can, don't be afraid of sending your offer to different people in the same company
Keep on accepting new sponsors even if it's last minute. You can still use the money if it arrives 2 weeks before the conference. Or pass it to charity later.
make an email list or a group to make it easy and convenient to send emails to sponsors. Don't keep separate threads with each sponsor. It's too much work to find all of them and write in-context messages to them instead of memos when you need to announce something.
Sponsors think the location of their booth is very important. Create a map of available locations and mark the coffee buffet, enterance and auditorium. Let them choose one by one starting with the main sponsor and then... In the order of payments! It's a great hack to get money from sponsors early.
Don't hesitate to experiment with booth placement. They don't have to be located in rows along the walls. You can scatter them in the middle of an open space. The only important factor is to never put them out of the way of participants going from auditorium to coffee and back.
Don't make attendees feel like they're being sold. Don't arrange the space so that the only way to move about the venue is to walk an unnecessarily long route through all of the sponsors. Visiting sponsors area should be optional but convenient.

Website

Keep it simple.
Have a person responsible for the website - should not be the same person as the main organizer, but the main organizer should have access to post there too.
Publish it as early as possible.
Prioritize for good navigation and loading time on mobile, that's where/when people really need it.
Start with just the description of the event and sponsor offer + CFP links.
Post a CoC, even if you think it's not necessary, some people need it to feel safe.

Budget 💰

Make a spreadsheet.
Split expenses into must-haves and optional.
Don't spend money you don't have in the bank. A lot of expenses can be scheduled for payment after the conference.
Avoid signing deals or ordering things for more money you're going to get from confirmed sponsors.
Use the booth-choice-after-payment hack to get more money earlier.

Savings opportunities 🎉💰💰💰

It's likely some of the sponsors will be willing to provide bags and/or lanyards with their logo on those in addition to what they already give you in sponsorship deal. Or give you some they already have laying around. Just ask if they're interested. Start from the main sponsor as they're the ones who should have their logo most visible. The expense can be shared between more sponsors if they want to share the space.
Negotiate catering hard. It's always negotiable. Aim for 20-30% discount. You can make it an hour shorter. Your coffee break offer probably involves juice and soft drinks. You can negotiate it down by providing coffee, tea and water. Sponsors will happily bring branded soft drinks to their stands and you can get the catering to give you a much better deal by cutting that.
Consider big fancy sandwiches or tortillas instead of hot lunch. Put a list of places where attendees can get lunch on the website if you're not providing a free lunch though. They're willing to pay, but not willing to waste time.
Don't do t-shirts for attendees. Nobody wants them. There's better things to put in the gift bags for less money. Socks are awesome and they cost less than 50% of a lame t-shirt price. Be creative. T-shirts are too obvious.
This one won't make you feel good about yourself if you think about it too much, but ask your speakers if they need hotel or if they can get it covered by their employer or stay at a friend's place. They often can. And set a deadline for confirmation of that so you can book the right number of rooms. Make it cancellable, you're likely to cancel at least one room last minute.
Get offers and pricing from many companies for gadgets, lanyards, bags etc. Prices vary a lot. Remember to mention it's a non-profit event and all money you don't spend with them goes to charity.

Technical

Don't print participant names on badges. It makes registration more difficult and nobody cares. Do it for speakers only. I regretted it every time I did the print for attendees. Give them blanks and markers if you feel like it. Or rather, come up with other networking helpers.
Think of some networking helpers - a corner with games, chairs arranged for group conversations, "talk to me about" stickers or labels on badges.
You know the back side of the badge needs to have the agenda printed, but did you know to put it upside-down? It's easier to use with the lanyard.
If you tell speakers they have 20 minutes, make your agenda with 25-30 minute slots. Running ahead instead of running behind on schedule is a great feeling.
make sure you communicate the talk time to speakers clearly and multiple times, in CFP and after they get accepted.
It's likely one of your speakers will drop out last minute. Go through top speakers whose talks didn't make it through CFP, select the ones who live in the city of the event or will be there anyway, ask them one by one until one agrees if they'd be willing to be a backup speaker. Offer a free vip ticket to the backup speaker.
Don't forget to make speaker badges stand out visually. You won't recognize their faces when looking for them in the crowd.
Plan your CFP process. Anonymized voting may not be enough, you need a second step to curate the final list. Ask for a recording of any previous performance in CFP as an optional field.

Tracks

Single track conferences are good. Good content in one track is better than choice. Choice induces FOMO.
If you do tracks make sure they're vastly different. In terms of topics or experience level.
Think it through: what happens when almost everyone prefers one track's talk? Will they fit in the room?
People are more likely to exit in the middle of a talk when there's other tracks or options.

more than a month before the event

Humans 🙋

Choose a volunteer staff coordinator. Best people to fill that role are people involved in student organizations.
Don't call volunteers volunteers :) Refer to them as co-organizers in your recruitment announcement. There's specific laws around hiring volunteers in many countries and it can get ugly.
Your staff gets a free pass and a conference staff t-shirt. Choose t-shirt color that's easy to recognize so you'll notice them easily. Don't overdo it though ;) they should be happy to wear those. Wear it yourself too.
Make sure staff members have time to experience half of the talks on some schedule. If you need 3 staff members, get 6 and organize work so that they are only needed all at the same time during morning registration.
Choose a MC (master of ceremony). Explain the role to folks interested in it. It's not just about holding the microphone and announcing speakers. It's also about keeping the speakers' spirit and confidence up. And timing their talks.
Multiple tracks = multiple MCs
Don't become the MC yourself. Main organizers don't have enough time to do it right
make your MC practice the introductory talk in front of people. Then make it shorter. If it's in foreign language, they need to prepare the vocabulary. Help them train improv to avoid breaking your own CoC
You need one more person to help with stage and speakers when MC is busy. That person can be shared between tracks. I call that auditorium manager

Venue 🏛

Plan the layout of your conference. Imagine you're an attendee focused on networking, not talks and optimize layout for that.
Put registration near the entrance, but not in a location that'd block going in or out.
Put coffee and munchies in the same open area as sponsors to make sponsors happy.
Put coffee and munchies far enough from closest sponsor booth to let people eat comfortably without feeling like they're being stalked.
Make sure people talking loudly near the food won't interrupt the talks (preferably even if the auditorium door is not closed)
It should be easy for the attendees to go get something to drink during a talk discretely, without everyone else noticing them - make sure there's an exit available that doesn't require walking in front of the stage.
If possible, find a place with easy access to the stage, but not easily accessible from the general open area - this is your speakers lounge. It should be safe to leave one's belongings there or in the storage room.
Pick a room that can be locked all the time with enough keys available for multiple organizers for easy access. It's your storage room.
Speakers lounge and storage room can be one room if you can have volunteers be there looking after it or opening and locking the room as necessary. You'll figure it out. If you do merge these two functions, remember to keep the storage tidy and chairs/tables for speakers not covered with random organization-related items.
Make sure there's an electric socket for each sponsor booth or can be made available via an extension cord.
Ask venue what's the max voltage and generally don't let sponsors use electric kettles, coffee makers and such.
Choose a chillout/quiet area for attendees. No matter what you do some of them will attempt to work remotely during the conference 😁

Money 💰

Time to order stuff. Gadgets, staff t-shirts, bags and lanyards if you didn't get those from sponsors.
Send tickets to sponsors now if you offered them. They need time to distribute those and get their employees registered.

Last 2 weeks

Send a reminder to all attendees.
Ask all speakers how they're doing. Write something that prompts a response. If they don't respond, follow up.

Venue 🏛

Meet the technical staff of the venue. Repeat what features you need, the number of microphones etc. They probably never got all the details.
Ask where you can put arrows and posters. Ask if hey have portable boards or TVs to put in the corridor. Agenda on a TV is great, especially if you can replace it yourself with an updated version when your schedule suddenly changes.

Shopping list

small water bottles 2x speaker count
a large handful of markers
paper a4 and a3
duct tape and transparent tape
scissors!
a few extension cords for sponsor booths
multiple cans/bottles of your favorite energy drink (you will forget where you left one)

Humans 🙋

Create a list of phone numbers to all organizers and staff with names and roles. Print copies for staff room, speaker lounge and a few for organizers' pockets.
Tell everyone when to show up and where. Explicitly ask if they'll make it on time. Explicitly ask to get a call if they struggle to get there or cancel last minute.

At the event

Before you distribute the phone number list cross out people who won't show up.
Send most staff to set up the registration, leave one to help sponsors with their issues if any
Let auditorium manager check the mics and agenda displays
Look at yourself in the mirror, you're going to announce the conference start in a moment. Remove bits of breakfast you hastily consumed.
Check if the venue representative is available at the location or over the phone.
Spend a minute just looking at what you've done ;)

I'd love to get some gems from your experience! Please share.