MakerX The Columbus Maker Expo is a public festival celebrating creating with technology that takes place in Columbus, Ohio. I led the development and operations of MakerX through its first three annual festivals. After moving away from Columbus I helped launch the fourth year but no longer have any ties to the event.
This page summarizes my thoughts on how to start a successful maker festival for those interested in doing so. It’s not a complete manual, but focuses on the key elements.
MakerX 2018 had 70 exhibitors and 1000 people in attendance on a budget of $3500. MakerX 2019 had 95 exhibitors and 1300 people in attendance on a budget of $8000. MakerX 2020 had 90 exhibitors and about 2000 people there.
It’s not complicated. It does take a lot of work.
You are putting on a one or two day event where people come and share what they do while other people come and check it out. That’s it in a nutshell. Obviously you will need a place, some funds, and a way to get people to come, but this is not a complex undertaking. You can do this.
Yet even a modest-sized event will take hundreds of hours to plan and execute. You and your team needs to commit large amounts of time up front.
First, put together a team of anchor exhibitors. These people should help plan the event, should have good credentials for seeking funding, and should have a sufficiently strong leadership position within their own organization to deliver a substantial exhibit on their own. Schools (especially robotics or engineering teams), Colleges, community makerspaces. libraries with makerspaces, and arts organizations are good opportunities to find the core team.
Realize that some of your team members will push to have the event at their place. This is a bad idea if it is a recruitment tool for them. It will scare away participation by their competitors and they will be disappointed with the results in terms of new members or students.
Write a one-piece-of-paper prospectus that describes the event, lists your objectives, your team, and your funding needs. Develop it as you go along. One of ours is here. Share it with possible funding sources and exhibitors. Share it with anyone who will read it.
You will need to find a fiscal sponsor early in the process.
Decide how independent you want to be.
One of our biggest early choices was to affiliate with the commercially licensed MakerFaire brand or not. It was especially critical since a previous MakerFaire had been held in our city but had left some bad feelings. Ultimately we decided that the brand recognition would not be worth the fees, restrictions, and fixed expectations of what the event would be and thus we did not affiliate. The future of the MakerFaire brand is in doubt as of 2019, but the question of doing your own thing is still relevant. Don’t make a what appears to be an easy and safe choice only to regret it later.
Similarly, we had to decide if we wanted to approach the large science museum in our city or hold the event at one of our planning team’s schools. We felt that it was important to establish the event on “neutral ground”–at a location that did not provide a recruitment advantage to the host who could look to gain members or students from the event at the cost of others who might want to exhibit. We also decided not to have it at venue such as a museum that needed to get additional revenue beyond our costs to organize the event. This was mostly to minimize the cost of tickets for our attendees (just $5 with many freebees the first two years and free the third). Our first event ended up at a public school, our second and third at a state fair grounds.
Decide how big you want to become.
It is certainly possible to start small and grow to find your level, which might be good idea in a lower population density area. We choose to start MakerX with a “go big or go home” attitude with the aim of quickly becoming as large as any other maker festival in the state. We are in a big city with lots of big events competing for the attention of the public. Aside from community size, if you come out of the box bigger in size you will know how much work and money the event will need the following year and what your facilities needs will be. Moreover you will have much more recognition in the community. It may be less work in the end to start bigger and coast down (if needed).
My observation of successful MakerFaires and independent festivals is that they mostly converge on 70-100 exhibitors and 1000-1500 attendees per day.
Find a place. Plan out your costs.
Maker festivals take up a lot of space. A festival of the size range mentioned above needs 30,000-60,000 square feet of space along with 100 or more tables, at least double that of chairs, plentiful access to electricity, food, restrooms, wifi if possible, and 400 or more parking spaces.
Big spaces can be hard to find and expensive. Rental spaces often need to be reserved a year in advance if they are even available to you. So once you have a target size for your event, get out and look at what is available in your community. Check out large public schools, colleges and universities, fair grounds, and perhaps very large libraries. You will likely find that convention centers and conference/reception spaces are prohibitively expensive. A local museum may take you on but the cost of admission to your event will need to cover their costs as well and that will skew who is able to come to your event.
Ultimately you will need to obtain and augment detailed floor plans of your space with room measurements and plots of the exact location of electrical outlets and exits before you can even begin to plan the event layout.
The costs you should budget for include: space rental (including a set up day if you need it), table and chair rental, electrician, janitorial services, security, wifi, liability insurance, ticketing/web hosting, and event advertising. You may not need to pay all of those in the end, but be sure to ask up front. You should have food available since people tend to spend a lot of time at these events (I estimate 3 hours average) but you do not want bear the costs or work of providing food. Work with the on-site concessionaire or bring in food trucks.
Adverstise. Buy ads. Really.
Your exhibitors and your team are the best source of word-of-mouth advertising for your event and that might seem like enough. It is not.
Most of the people who will come to your event are not in your, or your exhibitor, networks. So you need paid ads also. At present, Facebook ads provide by far the cheapest and most effective way to get your event in front of the public that doesn’t know they need to come to your event. You can target location and interests very carefully with these ads and you get good analytics on how people are responding. I suggest a long running, low spend ad campaign (3 months in advance) in combination with a short (3-4 week) high spend campaign leading up to your event. Most people need to have your event put in front of them multiple times before they even recognize that it’s for them. 75% of them wont buy their ticket until the week of the event. Yes, it is nail biting. We spent $1500 on Facebook ads and $400 on posters, signs, etc to get 1300 people to our second event.
Yes do social media as well but also get your team out there at events to recruit exhibitors and attendees at similar events in the months leading up to yours. Nothing beats the impact of face-to-face interaction.
Start recruiting exhibitors external to your team as early as possible. We sent out emails to over 300 potential exhibitors in our region to start our recruitment efforts the first year. As you get good submissions back publicly post a solid list of these charter exhibitors early and use it to recruit more. No one wants to commit until they know who else is coming to the party. This is why you put your core exhibitors on the planning team at the start.
Treat your exhibitors really, really well.
They are the show, there is no maker festival other than them.
I organized exhibits at other people’s maker festivals for five years before moving on to lead MakerX. These are the things I experienced that really made me not want to participate as an exhibit organizer: unnecessarily lengthy application forms, lack of regular communications about my status or planning for the event, a tiny little space at the event, no access to electricity, increasing the number of hours and even days we were expected to be there, expecting that we bring something for every one of the 1000+ attendees to “make-and-take”, and high ticket prices (>$20 per adult at one museum-hosted festival) leading to a very undiverse group of attendees. Don’t do this. Make the whole thing as hassle free as possible for your exhibitors and make sure they know that you appreciate the fact that they have given their entire day or more to be there.
Think carefully about how many hours your event will be open. There is a tendency to push for two full days to maximize revenue. Some exhibitors may like setting up on Friday and spending their entire Saturday and Sunday at your event. I bet most wont like it at all. MakerX has run 10-5 on Saturday only with setup immediately before and after. We cut that down to 10-4 for 2020. I have participated in an event as an exhibitor that was only 4 hours long and it was awesome for everyone.
Be aware that 5-10% of your exhibitors will cancel at the last minute or just wont show. Feel free to black list them for the future but it’s just part of the way these things go.
How will your event become sustainable?
In year three we are still working on this one for MakerX. Our original “business plan” was to have enough sponsorship committed to cover our cost the first year and to use our first year ticket revenue to immediately underwrite the cost of a venue for the second. Then lather, rinse, and repeat for each year. This has worked out and we have gone from zero dollars to enough funds on deposit with our fiscal sponsor to commit to the space we need a year in the future for year three without financial risk.
However, the mix of sponsorship and ticket revenue will evolve, as will everything else. Sponsors will lose interest, organizing team members will lose interest, venues will change cost and availability, and exhibitors need to be rotated to keep things fresh. Think about how the event will keep going indefinitely right from the beginning. Keep bringing new people in at each turn of the crank, keep the organization light and lean, keep costs to a bare minimum, and keep getting the word out there.
