Update of our pricing policy

Dear Lifters,

We have decided to update our pricing policy, and wanted to give you more information about how we will work from now on and why. Below are explanations about these changes (which will not affect early registrants as long as you get your ticket before December 26th!), what they are and why we are implementing them.

About conference pricing

The pricing of a conference is a complicated thing. When you want to explore innovation and society like we do, you HAVE to recreate diversity in the audience. You need to give access to all categories of people to prevent the conference from becoming a focal point for a certain community which could make the conference too techie, or too social, or too arty, or too much whatever.

At Lift we pride ourselves on welcoming famous entrepreneurs and start-ups, artists and designers, journalists and bloggers, venture capitalists and business angels, private sector employees and international workers, students and researchers, and more. Each of these categories has different needs, timing and purchasing power. They also create value in different ways for the conference. Some will promote it, some will cover it, some will speak, some will simply come to listen and stay passive (which is perfectly fine).

Overall, there is a need for us to make the conference accessible and appealing to each type of attendee, and it is not an easy task. Students have very limited resources, while workers from large companies do not spend their own money and have to prove to their bosses that the conference they plan to attend is serious.

The second problem we have is that we do not know in advance who will contribute to the success of the conference. Which journalist will write an in-depth article to share the news with his readers or viewers? Which blogger will spread the word to his community? Which attendee will organize a workshop that will start great conversations among attendees? We never know, and are left guessing most of the time, having to make tough decisions every once in a while for borderline cases. In an ideal world, attendees would be charged after their participation, but this is an impossible model. If we could charge 5% of all business created at Lift, the conference would have a huge budget to organize logistics and speakers' travel, but a system like this is impossible to install.

Our former policy

So far, our policy was to:

• Sell cheap tickets well below the market price set by our partner conferences (see Picnic, Leweb, TED) who did a great job selling out with tickets costing three to eight times more than Lift.
• Give 200 free tickets to students, journalists, bloggers and former speakers.
• Organize around 150 more free tickets for young entrepreneurs and students via partnerships with Alp ICT, HEC Lausanne, TechnoArk, University of Geneva, EPFL, CERN, etc etc.
• Sell the remaining tickets to our community, with incremental price increases rewarding you for making our lives easier. If you register early, you generate cash flow that we use to pay for speakers' travel, and you make the conference more appealing as your presence creates momentum to be followed by other registrants.
• Save 100 cheaper tickets for non-profit organizations
• Sell super tickets to those wanting to show more support to the conference, and attend speakers' activities in return.
• Rely on partners to pay the remaining 50% of the budget while adhering to our no-commercial-content-on-stage rule. This has worked out great, and Lift is one of the few conference where partners get value through visibility, partner events and innovation watch, but not through the stage. We managed to explain the reality of things: pitching simply does not work. To reach people you need to add value to the conference, by adding more activities, giving a cool gift, bringing in the coolest people from your staff, etc. A big thank you to them, the conference could not exist without their support.

The problem

By trying to have an average price and please everybody with one formula, we seem to have created a problem.

First, as cheap as Lift is (compared to other conferences), the ticket still represents a large sum of money that students and the unemployed can hardly afford. This is in part addressed by the student passes and non-profit prices, but we want to do more and are working on creating more partnerships than ever with schools and universities (see the latest we signed with the HEAD, 25 students and professors are joining Lift on that move).

The second problem that has been reported to us (and in our surveys where close to 25% of attendees think the conference is worth more than what they paid for) is that the conference's below-average price is giving Lift a bad image. A conference where tickets cost one fifth of the price of others can only be organized one-fifth as well right? Seen from the outside, our price has become a handicap for some potential first-time participants who haven't come across the fantastic post-conference evaluations we get every year (more here). Our price sometimes gives the impression of an amateur event, and those of you who know Lift know that this is not the case.

The solution

We will try to accommodate everybody, but in a different way. We will keep a below market price for our core community, rewarding those who register six months in advance. But the price will go up earlier than before, because we really need to trade this cheaper price for early support. You pay 50% less, we get you on-board earlier. That's a fair exchange. This price will always be available immediately after each conference for the next one, for several weeks. So if you liked the experience, go straight to the registration page of the next event (we will give you the URL in the closing remarks) and reserve your cheaper seat.

The price will then go up four months before the conference, still cheaper than most conferences but a 50% increase from the super-early bird tickets.

One month before the conference, we will enter the final stage of pricing, and align ourselves with what Lift would cost if there were no partners on board. This will compensate for the earlier tickets, and help cover the CHF 800,000 of resources engaged during the three days of the conference.

Closing remarks

I believe this solution will solve the above problems. We still have a cheaper price for our core community, but give a more professional image to first time attendees who register late, and who mostly come from the private sector (which means they do not pay for their ticket themselves). More expensive tickets will also give a better image of the events to the part of our community who has their expenses covered.

For those who can not attend the conference, we will continue to post all talks online as soon as possible, and might even organize a live stream (discussions are underway with several partners). We also hosted 15 free events this year and plan to have many more in 2010.

Lift is not and will never be an industry conference (usually very expensive), nor will we reach the levels of certain American conferences charging thousands of dollars. I believe in serendipity and diversity way too much to change to a model where super expensive tickets allow for free tickets given by a committee who hand picks those who deserve to come free.

Lift is an association, and that is the reason why we will always be cheaper than commercial events. But we need to give a more professional image of ourselves, and price plays a big part in that. I hope this change - which is not really a change as we still give you a shot at the original price - will allow us to take Lift to the next level. Thanks to our community for their support since 2006 :)

Laurent Haug
Lift conference founder
PS: Early Bird tickets (650chf) now close on Dec. 26, hurry up!