Charging Attendees?

We concluded at today's meeting that the price shall be 7.95.

Original Message:
Mr. Adam and I discussed this today. The conclusions we came to are:

1. Charge a fee of about $5.00 to $10.00 to attend.
2. Make sure we have $5 to $10 worth of schwag alone.
This will add "take home value".

Any opinions?

The opinions are, let's see about not charging for this event. Thus we are going to have to go to a lot of work promoting.

Final decision due on Weds.

One of the things that I have tried to do is keep the meetups free. On the one hand that makes them affordable. On the other hand there are those that RSVP Yes and then never show up. A fee kind of encourages them to do so.

So what to do?

I was thinking about this Schwag idea. What if we have 2 registration possibilities. One to register to get the schwag..that would be a 10 dollar fee. The other, just to attend the event. That would be free?

Then we get the best of both worlds. List the schwag folks would be getting. But those that could not afford it, well they could still come to the event for free.

Any ideas?

The Ohio Linux festival registration works in a similar manner. Those who pay the registration for this event get extra schwag- a linux fest t-shirt, "backstage pass", and a few other goodies.
They still had many schwag items available for those who attended without paying the registration cost. I think this approach worked well as those who could afford the extra's did so, and those who couldn't were still enticed by a few goodies up for grabs.

I think optional is a good idea. Different levels. I'm just thinking there is going to be additional stuff we want people to have like a boxed lunch, t-shirt, bag of promotions ect. We could get it solely from the sponsors, but that would make it easy for people to skip the event cause the have nothing invested.

But I am not that familiar with these kinds of events, so maybe people will register and show without incentive.

It really is a tough call. We're talking about a significant investment for a person's time if it is an all day event. Some will bail if there is no fee. But I do not know how many. I lean towards as much as possible always being free (just how I am with these kinds of things). But also we will have expenses.