Our HamFest 2022 review and audit took place last night at the April Tri-County ARC club meeting. If you weren’t able to attend, here are some of the key facts we discussed.
- The final online order was made at 6:24 AM on Sunday.
- Between mail-in and web orders, we pre-sold 106 tickets and 94 tables BEFORE the Fest.
- Given an expected attendance of 250-300, we pre-printed another 200 tickets. To put it mildly, we grossly underestimated the demand. The final pre-printed ticket was sold at 8:31 AM!!! Our new ticketing system provide itself as we were able to generate and electronic tickets until we were able to generate and print more tickets around an hour later.
- Our official attendance was 471!!!
- We pre-sold 94 tables to vendors. 8 were assigned to vendors who couldn’t attend. We sold an additional 4 tables the morning of the Fest, resulting in an official table count of 90 tables.
- The Fest returned a nice profit, which will support the Club’s activities over the next year. With a planned tower move for the repeater, these funds will be put to good use later in the year!
For those of you who may have been stuck in the line to purchase tickets, thank you all for your patience! We failed you by not thinking large enough as we did not expect a turnout nearly DOUBLE what we planned for.
Our online web software processed orders for about half of the tickets and tables (39 of 90). For a first year, and for not having advertised the tool, we were very excited at that result. Additionally, when we ran out of tickets, the ability to generate and sell tickets online was the only thing keeping us running until we could print more tickets on the spot.
We’re viewing this as a good start, and are working with the software vendor to adjust for some of these things we’re learned. Have any suggestions you’d like to make? Email us and let us know!