Banner Photo by: Juju in the Box
One of Magicons core values is transparency, and to honour that we publish how we’ve spent our income each year. We believe this builds trust and understanding, not only with the visitors, but also with our sponsors and partners. I’ve made minor changes to the categorization of cost centres, hopefully making it easier to understand.
Let’s start with the income:
- Surplus from last year: 56.160,-
- Ticket Sales: 519.785,- (+22.8%)
- Grant: Oslo Kommune: 50.000,-
- Grant: Kulturtanken: 200.000,-
- Booths: 64.000,- (+53.8%)
- Merch & Drink Sales: 44.681,- (+65.8%)
Total income: 934.625,- (+5.7%)
Then let’s look at the expenses:
Running costs: N/A (Merged with tooling, explanation below)
Travel Expenses: 38.641,- (-35%)
Rent & Hired Personnel: 457.866,- (+5%)
Hotel: 47.330,- (-11.8%)
Honorariums: 47.854,- (+16.6%)
Printed Materials: 72.173,- (+26.8%)
Inventory: 28.629,- (+41.2%)
Tooling: 24.071,- (+135.1%)
Marketing: 32.226,- (-15.8%)
Prizes: 17.550,- (-8.6%)
Food & Drinks: 39.449,- (-16.7%)
Crew Activities: 21.554,-
Total Expenses: 827.343,- (-0.018%)
Result: 107.282,-*
*Disclaimer: Small variables may affect the result, like hidden fees, late expense reports etc. Nothing major though.
Note: All requested invoices were paid at the latest 15 days after the convention.
Further reading with comments from ProducerChan.
- Perspective
- Comments and insights on expenses
- Road ahead and final thoughts
1: Perspective
Looking at numbers in a list often gives a skewed perception of reality. To make it easier to understand, let us look at how the costs are divided in a graph.
Some people actually say: “Stop blaming the cost of rent and lower your ticket prices”. If we could, we would. As you can see in the graph, the cost of rent is the major contributor to our expenses. This is the biggest challenge with organising a convention in Oslo.
Please note that the cost of rent for Origins was only for one day. There were also no seats at the main stage, no security other than our own, the venue was placed outside of Oslo, with a limit of 700 people and we also had no money for prizes. A different time indeed.
Here’s a juicy pie chart for a clearer picture of where each type of cost goes:
Like in the feedback report, I’d like to address a couple of misconceptions.
“Your international guests increased the ticket price”
No. As you can see from the hotel and travel costs, it has decreased a lot. It all depends on where the guest is travelling from. Example: One of our guests from the northern part of Norway for Magicon Elevation cost us 13x more to bring to Oslo, than a guest for Evolution this year from eastern Europe. Read that again.
“You shouldn’t have spent all that money to make an app”
The total monetary cost of developing the app and running the app during the convention came to the grand total of *drum roll*… 236,-. To top it off, the crewmember who did this, didn’t even want his expenses reimbursed. Round of applause to the amazing Espen for spending his free time developing this for Magicon for free!
“Day passes were too expensive”
I actually agree, but consider this question: “Which costs, are you as a day-pass buyer, saving Magicon as a whole?” Is making Magicon becoming any cheaper, by you only attending one day? Short answer is no. In an ideal world, we’d sell out day passes for both days and it’ll all be good from there. But as we’re very aware of, Saturday sells better than Sundays, regardless of content. Each day pass sold, means one weekend pass that can’t be sold, due to venue capacity. Our expenses remain the same.
As it was very popular last year, I’ll do the cost/hour maths again.
A weekend ticket cost 670,-
There’s 16 hours of content, which equals 41.8,-/hr
There’s about 1000 visitors, making us 41.875,-/hr
Our cost of running the convention is 51.708,-/hr
In other words, the convention costs 23.4% more to run, than what the visitors are paying. We’re highly dependent on government grants, booth, merch and drink sales to keep the price at what it is. None of these are guaranteed, and requires a shit ton of work.
2: Comments and Insights on Expenses
Running costs since last Magicon:
As I was adding these together, I realised they’re mainly in 2 categories.
- Subscriptions, like banking, digital signatures or Google workspace. These are tools we use all the time, so I’ve moved these costs to “Tooling”.
- Costs regarding things we do for the crew outside of the Con weekend. I’d like to track this myself, so I’ve made a new category just for this.
Travel Expenses:
I’ve been looking forward to this: 6 international guests MAY (and did this time) cost less than 3, depending on where they travel from. I addressed this earlier, so there is no need to elaborate further here. This is likely to remain the same in the future.
Hotel:
We got a better deal than last year. More guests, lower cost. How cool is that? This is likely to remain the same in the future.
Rent & Hired Personnel:
Slight increase, but in line with inflation rates. Very little we can do here. This is likely to slightly increase in the future.
Honorariums:
My goal is that one day Magicon can pay panellists and judges a flat fair fee. We’re not there yet, but we’ve made big steps towards it. Last year we had between 40 and 50 external contributors to the program, this year it was over 140. The slight increase is expected and well earned. This is likely to slightly increase in the future.
Printed Materials:
The increase here is again two fold.
- We were unable to secure the deal we had last year, which gave us large savings by outsourcing the printing to eastern Europe. I am however positive that we’ll get that back for Unchained.
- Signage. This is requested by both visitors and booths, so we do what we can. I will however challenge you on this: use our webpage, our app, our SoMe, our Info booth to get the answers you need… and save us (and you by proxy) many many thousands of kroner. Also, since most of this can’t be reused, there is also a case to be made for the environment as well. This is likely to go down in the future.
Inventory:
Big spike here. On our journey to become more independent, and own our own stuff, we’ve invested in a laptop and software for the performances on the main stage. We’ve bought additional equipment for the security crew to handle queues better and a few things for the FeelGood crew that we can reuse. This is likely to remain similar, but likely lower in the future.
Tooling:
As I’ve moved the “running costs” to this category, it has seen a significant increase. However, as this cost is not reliant on the number of crew members, I’m fairly certain it’ll remain the same going forward.
Marketing:
I wrote a long paragraph about this last year. We’ve lowered the costs, and if you’d like to lower it more, buy your ticket as early as you’re able. The earlier we know we’re “good”, the less marketing we need to do. This is likely to stay similar going forward.
Prizes:
This is highly dependent on our sponsors. We got a couple of amazing new ones this year, and we’ll continue to look for more. Although prizes only cost Magicon 17550,- the value of the prize pool was around 120k, how cool is that?? This is likely to decrease going forward.
Food and Drinks:
The first two years this cost was way too high – which I was very honest about in the previous financial reports. We’ve now lowered it to where it should be. It is important to keep crew satisfaction in mind, and play the balancing game just right. This is likely to stay the same going forward.
Crew Activities:
This is a new category that I added this year (accumulated from the “Running costs” category). Call me biassed, but I honestly think these volunteers deserve so much more. If you break it down, it’s 52,- per crew member per month or… 0.39,- per hour they’ve put into making Magicon happen. However, as you could see in the experience survey, they’re very happy with what they got. Incredible. This is likely… scratch that, this will increase in the future. They deserve it. Vetoed by Mr. ProducerChan.
3: The road ahead and final thoughts
The hardest part of writing these extensive reports (aside from finding the time) is to make them easy to digest. There are a lot of numbers, a lot of information and not least a lot of considerations. To see things in perspective, or at the very least in contrast to one’s own economical situation, is hard. The goal is to shine light where there has been none for so long.
Like I said last year, it makes me so happy to see so many new cosplay conventions popping up all over Norway and the nordics. The community is gaining ground after the pandemic, and it needs space. A lot of space. This is why it’s great that we have a lot of different types of conventions. We have some that are either free, highly specified or are held in small, local venues around the country and so on… At the same time, we need to put the Norwegian cosplay community on the map. There’s so many brilliant people here that belong on the international stage. Let’s become a part of all the spectacular things that goes on out there!
We’ve become awfully comfortable in our own cocoon. With our own ways of doing things and even set up our own local rules for how we want things to be. There’s a whole world out there waiting for us to join them and Magicon aims to do just that. To get there, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome, and Magicon is confronting these one by one. Will we always succeed perfectly? No. Will we keep pushing? Damn right we will.
I hope some of the information in this report has shed some light on the realities of organising a Cosplay convention in Oslo. I’ll also challenge our very vocal critics to tell us where to cut costs from section 2. Please remember that the ticket prices are what we have to take, not what we’d prefer to take. We’re non profit, and volunteer driven. Fun fact: The more guests we get, the less we need to charge per ticket.
Lastly I want to address the fact that we’re at a 107k profit.
This is 12.9% liquidity. Liquidity means accessible assets, after debts are paid. I wrote in my very first report from Magicon Origins that 15% liquidity is healthy for an organisation like this. The mistake I made at that time was assuming that government grants and booths were a given. They’re not. For the ones of you with a keen eye, you’ve seen that we’ve gotten 170k LESS in grants this year. Magicon will try to increase this number going forward, not only to build capital, but to run the organisation as professionally as possible. It’s written in Magicons constitution, that if Magicon were to stop, all assets will be donated to charity.
Bonus:
We tried something new this year and held an auction with Magillamas. Big thanks to Namdals FHS for making the costumes for the Llamas, but of course also to everyone who bid on them as well! We gathered about 4600,- here, and Magicon rounded that sum up to a nice 5000,- for Barnekreftforeningen (The Norwegian Childhood Cancer Society). We’d love to make this a recurring thing. Let us know if you think this is something we should keep doing!
That’s all from me, you’ll hear from me soon enough ;)
/Christopher Helland – ProducerChan – Chairman of Magicon
