As noted above, $515,145 is much higher than the direct cost of running an online meeting due to the way we spread some operational costs.
In order to budget for an income that recovers this reduced cost, we considered reducing both the registration fee income and the sponsorship income. We chose to reduce the registration fee income more than we reduced the sponsorship income as we feel the change to online from an in-person meeting has less of an impact on sponsors than it does on participants. For example, the nature of participation via online technology is less nuanced and interactive than in-person, while the same technology makes it easy to recognise the valuable contribution of our sponsors.
Consequently, we have chosen a registration fee at one-third that of an in-person meeting and sponsorship levels at two-thirds. Our recent survey included a question about fees (p88) and the answers from that while quite varied and imprecise, indicate that a fee in this range would be acceptable to most of the respondents.
As online participants have until now not had to pay a fee, there may be some for whom the fee presents a barrier to participation and so this budget includes a substantial increase in our fee waiver program to 100 early bird registrations.
Using these figures and estimating 1100 attendees spread across the various levels of fee (including 100 fee waivers), we get the following budget for an online IETF 108: