CONFERENCE REVENUE IS IMPORTANT TO PUBLIC MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS, BUT IT HAS RISKS

Say hello to our old friend, Mr. Tote Bag.  We have been together since the PRPD conference in Memphis in 1999. 

Mr. Bag and I have traveled the world together. They don’t make conference bags like this anymore!

As you know, conferences are getting more expensive to attend and to produce. 

Many business groups and organizations have downsized conferences or stopped having them. 

For sponsoring organizations, conferences are “contingent liabilities.” One bad year can damage or sink everything.

PRPD faced an existential moment on September 11, 2001. The PRPD was scheduled to begin that day. Many attendees were on their way to BWI airport.  PRPD called it off, despite thousands of dollars of “sunk costs.” This put the future of PRPD in peril.

Marcia Alvar, PRPD’s CEO at the time, took action. She asked people too donate their registration fees to secure the organization’s future. People did and we can’t recall hearing any complaints. But, a situation like this can certainly happen again.

We decided to look at the role conference revenue plays in seven public media organizations (see the chart on the left). 

The bottom line is that most of them depend on conference revenue to operate day-to-day operations.

Most of the information comes from IRS 990 filings. We tried to use 2017 data because it was available for almost every organization on the chart.

These are “ball park” numbers because most organizations don’t make detailed conference profit/loss data available. From what we can see, some organization are taking big risks.

It is difficult to know the full cost of conferences because salaries and overhead are reported on IRS 990s separate from conference expenses.

The topline data for five of the seven organizations shows that conference revenue added to the organization’s cash flow. PRNDI had a small loss.

WXPN’s AAANONCOMMvention is an outlier in this group. The NONCOMM charges no membership fees and offers attendees the lowest registration fees of any public media conference.

The organization taking the biggest percentage  risk appears to be the Public Broadcasting Management Association (PBMA). They list only two major expenses: Their annual conference and money paid to “management.”