tickets

We have moved the deadline for early bird tickets for 10 days, they are now available until May 30!

One of the reasons is that we just sent a mailing to all past attendees these last 2 days and we want to give enough time to react.

More information on Lift11 tickets can be found here. Join us in Marseille to meet international speakers who not only offer prospective and disruptive visions, but also act upon these visions and will share their endeavors with us. You can expect both a glimpse of near-future challenges and opportunities, as well as actionable knowledge and experience.

It has been a recurrent request for the past years: creating the possibility to attend only part of Lift. We now offer this possibility and you can target specific days you would like to attend. Check the program, choose the days you want to attend, and !

Don't forget that the Lift11 early bird tickets are available until this week-end only. Don't miss the deadline and get your ticket at only 590chf instead of 900!

Visit the Lift11 ticket shop

In case you haven't seen the program, we will talk about "Re-organization (the changing workplace)", "Engaging users with games", "Building and managing communities", "Community mining (new forms of business intelligence)" and many more presentations on trends and inspiring projects. The currently confirmed speakers are below:

We have moved the deadline for early bird tickets one week. Several reasons for that, the main being that we confirmed eight speakers in the past three days and did not have time to communicate about them with the community.

We will also send a mailing to all past attendees on Monday, so once this has been done the early bird can be closed on October 8 at Midnight.

More information on Lift11 tickets can be found here.

We continue developing social ticket sales. After viral tickets, here comes the Lift affiliate program where members of our community can earn some money by promoting the event to their readers, fans, supporters, friends and followers!

How does it work?

1. Register with Amiando and provide your bank details so that they can pay you when you start working your magic :)
2. Use the affiliate link that Amiando gives you to create a link from your site to our ticket shop (feel free to use one of our banners, see below).
3. For those of you who have large communities (1000+ members), contact us to get a discount code.
4. For every person that buys a ticket by clicking on your link, you'll earn 10% commission on the ticket price.
5. This money will be deposited by Amiando directly in your bank account at the end of each month.

For more information on how Amiando's affiliate programs work please read their FAQ.

Further ideas

• Put the affiliate link in your email signature
• Blog about Lift - your past experiences and your thoughts on the coming edition and add a link to the ticket shop.
• Shorten the url and include it in a tweet or on facebook

Here are our banners:

Tomorrow our ticket shop switches from super early bird to early bird, which means the price will go up by 160chf to 590chf. Don't miss that deadline and get your Lift11 ticket at the best possible price.

You will also be enrolled in our viral tickets system which allows you to get your ticket for less (or free!) by promoting Lift to your network. Find out more on the Lift11 registrations page!

Nos partenaires de Radio Grenouille à Marseille tirent au sort trois tickets pour Lift with Fing 10. Pour participer répondez à la question "pour vous le web a changé quoi dans votre vie ?" et envoyez la réponse à je grenouille888.org.

Les trois meilleurs réponses gagneront un ticket qui permettra d'assister aux trois jours de conférence du 5. au 7. Juillet au Grand théâtre de la Criée :)

Here comes a new idea: we know some of you would like to contribute to the conference via your network, ideas or time. We know paying CHF850 to register is not always easy, that you might have missed the super early bird price, and that the student, volunteer or startup tickets do not work for everybody.

So let's experiment with something new: the value exchange ticket. Can you convince Steve Jobs to come keynote at Lift? Can you promote the conference to the one million members of your online community? Do you know the CEO of a big company who would love to become a partner of a conference like Lift? If yes, tell us what you plan to do, we will evaluate your proposition and give you a corresponding discount on the entry price!

This is completely beta, and it might sometimes create a bit of unwanted frustration (typically when you want to propose a speaker for a conference without knowing that we finalize 90% of our program six months in advance). But, we are always eager to try new things, and we believe our community is full of good people who will make the most of this new way to attend Lift10.

^{One of the many ways to get a Lift10 ticket.}

Important reminder: the early bird price (650chf) is closing this Saturday, Dec. 26. Get your ticket now to pay 50% of the price it will cost you in April! We are closing on 200 participants, a huge boost from a year like 2007 when we had 100 registered participants one month from the conference (which ended-up hosting 650 persons). But we want to make sure all the self employed/independents who pay their tickets themselves get in at the cheapest price. So hurry up, and choose the pre-payment option if you have to wait for Santa to bring you a bit of cash. It will buy your ticket now, and give you a few more weeks to make a bank transfer. Register for Lift10.

On the student passes front, we received 13 propositions so far, which means at this point 100% of registrants will get their free ticket, and seven will not be used. Don't let that happen! Because they are scheduled early, the student passes always attract around 30 propositions, which means 66% of submitters get a free ticket. Propositions close on January 15, and all you need to do is take five minutes to fill the online form.

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!