[penguicon-general] Wrangling LUGs

[Rob Landley]

On Tuesday 01 May 2007 4:14 pm, Neal Probert wrote:
> If we want more LUG folks, I would suggest giving LUG members a 
> discount.  Base that discount on the number of members from that LUG 
> attending.  Perhaps a prize for the winning LUG with the most attending 
> members, best party, longest distance traveled, coolest LUG table.  A 
> lot of these guys are bringing in loads of their own gear, so they 
> should also be rewarded/compensated likewise.

Data point:

For the first Linucon, I wrote an online registration system that 
accepted "coupon codes" that changed the price of registration (either by a 
delta or to an absolute value).  I then spread lots and lots of "$5 off 
current registration price" coupons everywhere I could, and made them 
different coupon codes so I could see who had found us through where.  I gave 
a code to each of our Guests of Honor (giving them an excuse to tell their 
fans about us _and_ give them a discount), I put them on flyers at the 
University of Texas, I gave them to the local LUGs, I put them on flyers we 
gave out at room parties, etc.  I also had some with an expiration date 
(yeah, I know "act now supplies running out" is sales, and I don't do sales, 
but I know the tricks) which I implemented by manually adding and removing 
them from the cgi script with a text editor. :)

A fringe benefit of this is I had various coupon codes that could comp badges 
(I had one and each department head had one), so that whenever somebody 
wanted to give out a free membership for some reason they could do so but it 
was easy to track who had given out what.  Things like the panelist 
registration rate was also a coupon code.  Everything could be done live 
through the online registration system, and every attendee had a badge number 
assigned (and displayed to them) at time of registration.  (I kept meaning to 
write a page that could dump the current registration list, but to be honest 
I just ssh'd into the server and did an ls -l in the directory.)

Altogether it was only a couple hundred lines of code.

Rob