This year's NTC brought 1,430 nonprofit professionals to the OMNI Hotel in Atlanta GA. Unlike in past years, we had a large number of late registrants: 18% of attendees registered in the month prior to the conference.
As many of you know, we raised $10,020 to send 61 people to the NTC on scholarship, which has (so far) resulted in 556 views of the NTEN Community Rhapsody. Judging by the 7,034 views of the 09NTC Scholarship campaign (Holly's remake of Beyonce's Single Ladies video), I've concluded that spandex is 12 times more interesting to our community than muppets.
Day 1 of the conference saw 122 attendees volunteer to help 58 organizations during the Day of Service, while 50 of you attended the Open Data Unconference and 139 went to We Are Media Sessions. Also on Thursday, there were 16 Affinity Group sessions; we like to think they were attended by the remainder of the 70% of conference attendees who checked-in at registration on Thursday.
Thursday also included the Science Fair, which had an all time high of 92 exhibitor booths. Meanwhile, there were 11 permanent exhibitors in the Sponsor Showcase and 18 in the Georgia Pavilion. While multiple exhibitors reported handing out between 300 and 400 fliers, only 6 lucky winners won iPads during the conference.
A big thanks to over 40 sponsors! Together with our exhibitors, they committed $344,900.00 to the NTC, just under 50% of our total income.
Where did that income go? Well, The biggest chunk, $227,044.42, was spent on catering and beverages, which comes out to be $158.77 per person and $26.46 per person per meal.
$38,071.01 were spent on printing and copying; this includes all printed materials, including your program book. It cost $10,458.22 for tote bags -- which we have to admit, we did run out of because of all the last minute registrations. We spent $57,025.98 on the awesome team of outside consultants who help NTEN's staff of 6 pull it all off.
Together with the rest of supplies, travel, facilities, AV, payroll and advertising, our total expenses were $643,673.38. With 1,430 attendees that comes out to $450 per person to put on the show. The 18.5% of you who registered at the early bird rate of $359.00 got a great deal on registration!
Throughout the conference, 293 speakers presented 134 sessions. Each session was scheduled for 1.5 hours, which means 10NTC had 201 hours full of learning.
Those of you who recall the Vegetarian Lunch Scandal of April 9th, 2010 and the subsequent solution that came out of your tweets will be happy to hear that there were a total of 7,903 tweets tagged #10NTC. The session with the most tweets (398) was The Networked Nonprofit: Using Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change. We think this is a testament to the speakers knowing their material. (We're looking at you Beth Kanter & Allison Fine.)
This was the first year that we've offered remote viewing parties for the NTC -- 3 of them, to be precise -- one in NY, one in DC and one in Austin. Our live streamed sessions had a concurrent viewing high of 660.
On the most popular night of the conference, NTC attendees took over 55% of the hotel, staying in 589 of the 1,070 rooms. They traveled far and wide to attend the conference. This year we had 61 international attendees; admittedly, 30 of those were from Canada, but the rest spanned the globe. From our rudimentary research, the furthest attendees came was from Singapore & Australia. (Anna and I tried to figure out which was further, but then remembered that the world is round and we don't know which direction the planes flew.)
As for U.S. attendees, we had 174 from our host state Georgia and, surprisingly, the most represented state was last year's host, California, with 188 attendees. Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa and North Dakota all represented with 1 attendee per state.
Lastly, we tried something new this year with a QR code NTC scavenger hunt, which the NTEN staff thought would be super fun. But only 30 of you were geeky enough to agree with us and complete it. Maybe next year in DC...