Due to work commitments I've not had a chance to blog my thoughts on how well the SOTR 2009 UK tour went. Time to rectify that.

2009 obviously saw us take a new approach with the conference, and I want to talk a little on that before I give my thoughts on London, Manchester and Edinburgh.

===Why tour?===

So why did we go on tour rather than stick with the tried and tested (and very successful) multi-day conference we have in Edinburgh? Looking at it, it does seem like a backwards step.

• 2005: 2 day conference with a single track
• 2007: 2 day conference with two tracks
• 2008: 3 day conference with 3 tracks
• 2009: single day events across 3 cities with a single track (3 tracks in London)

After a very successful 2008 conference at the George Hotel in Edinburgh, we had a month off before heading back into the George to get the ball rolling for 2009. The George loved having the CF and Flex crowd at the hotel so much, that they really roled out the red carpet to bring us back, and that included offering us the same hire fee for 2009 as we had for 2008. Why was this important? Well, it meant we didn't have to raise ticket prices. So 2009 prices would have been the same as 2008. A measley £199+vat for 3 days.

That's brilliant news, especially as the biggest cost of attending any conference (especially SOTR) is typicalyl the expenses; hotel and accommodation.

Then of course, the global economy decided to disappear up it's own backside; across the board we're hearing of redundencies, unpaid leave, cut backs, etc. What's the first thing to go on anyone's budget? training and conferences.

So, what do we do? What could we do? We gave ourself three options:

• run as is; 3 days with 3 tracks

This was too big a gamble. We simply couldn't justify the risk and expense of doing the conference in the same format when we knew attendence was going to be heavily affected. How many of you would have been given approval for 4 days in Edinburgh with the cost of a conference ticket, hotel and travel (plus expenses)? Not many. There's wild and unsubstantiated rumours go about that we make money off SOTR. For 2008, we made a £6k loss. In total, we spent £50,000 on 2008. That's a huge sum of money for a small 4 man company. We injected £16k of our own money into SOTR last year, with the rest coming from other sponsorship and ticket sales. That doesn't include the man-hours we put into the organising. We spend 5-6 months in the build up to SOTR, so try and attach a value to that. And as bizarre as it may sound, we don't do it to make money. We do it because it's fun. Also, if we didn't do it, no one else would.

• cancel completely

This would have been a horrible message to send out. People would have started speculating about Fuzzy Orange, about SOTR, about ColdFusion, about Adobe, about the commitment of other companies. So this wasn't an option.

• try something new

After the success of running one day events like ScotchOnAIR:Dublin, and a Wee Dram of Scotch in London, we decided to try taking Scotch on tour. Before we could commit to it we needed costs. As it turns out, the total cost of hiring the Sway Bar (London), TigerTiger (Manchester) and the Caves (Edinburgh) came to about £6,500. Throw in the cost of Fuzzy Orange travelling around the UK, (limited) promotion and some giveaways, we spent around £12,000 in total on SOTR 2009. We cut back on speakers (whereas in 2008 we spent heavily on bringing in internationals), we binned the conference bags, we dropped all the fun giveaways ... we had to. Interestingly, we didn't make money this year either (only a couple of hundred pounds loss). Even with a £49 ticket price, we still had to give lots of tickets away for free.

So, now that you know why we did the tour (as well as a few more tidbits of info), let's move onto our thoughts on the tour.

===London===

We held the London event at the Sway Bar. The venue gave us a fantastic deal which meant we got the entire bottom floor allowing us to host around 150 people. Having the entire bottom floor also meant we could host multiple tracks. So we had around 15 sessions, plus the Adobe keynote. In all the day seemed to go pretty well though there were a few screw ups;

• we forgot to unpack the name badges (sorry!)
• the seats were awful (I think they were OK in the main room but the others sucked)
• we went with the wall mounted LCD rather than a projection screen in the second room. We only had an hour to set up in the morning before everyone arrived so this decision was made to save time. It was a bad decision on our part
• the delivery of lunch was ... awful. We'll share the blame with the venue on this one. When the sessions finished for lunch, the food was nowhere to be found, so people went out and bought lunch only to come back in and find food now available.
• queuing to get in: in previous years we've had 5 people helping, this year we only had 3.
• free drinks. The bar staff were ... idiots to be honest. They took us way too literally. Everyone was given two vouchers which they could use to get two drinks. We told the bar staff "your favoured beed and house wine", not thinking that they would then restrict it to only "favoured beer and house wine". A few people asked for cokes, fresh orange, etc and were told no. We got this fixed, but sorry!

===Manchester===

Manchester actually went pretty good. I think that what helped here was there was no expectations. It was the first time we took any event to Manchester, so everyone really got into it. It was a small crowd, and we had a lot of no-shows, but it was fun. We ended up with a free bar at the end of the evening (£800 to spend on booze) so happy times :)

===Edinburgh===

Disaster. Absolute disaster. The venue, whilst unique in every sense, turned out to be the biggest mistake we made on the entire tour. Sorry guys. Really. We screwed up here. Hopefully the free bar at the end of the day made up for this a little. What also didn't work in Edinburgh was the single track. It just wasn't varied enough. Attendance suffered badly for this and a lot of the regulars from Scotland who have attended SOTR in the past didn't come. I know it's little consolation, but with the budget we had this year (and maybe the fact we spoiled you rotten in 2008) we really were limited. It may surprise folks to know that to get a venue in Edinburgh similar in capacity and flexibility to the Sway Bar in London would have cost us twice as much as London. Oh, we also had to be out of the venue by 6pm - meaning things got rushed - because there was a gig taking place that evening.

===Overall thoughts===

It was Ok. Whilst it was still SOTR, it had a completely new format, which meant we made a lot of mistakes. The impact it had on us physically was something we underestimated too. Travelling across the UK with all that gear, sheesh. By the time we got to Edinburgh on the Thursday I didn't even make it out for the pre-events drinks I was that knackered.

That being said, we know how to improve on this format, which is just as well, as we're taking it to mainland Europe in October.

We also had to rely heavily on speakers from sponsors this year, and some of these ended up being too sales-led. We were also limited to single tracks in Manchester and Edinburgh, and that turned out to be a big issue.

Ultimately we hope that everyone understands it was this or nothing for 2009. It was a backwards step in some respects, but given the reputation SOTR has built, hopefully you'll understand we had to adapt the conference to the economic environment, and whilst it was far from perfect, you'll stick with us.

===2010===

We're now looking at what to do for 2010. The big question is; can we go back to a 2 or 3 day multi-track conference in Edinburgh? Our big concern isn't the price of the conference ticket - I think you'll all agree we've always been very well priced - what we're worried about is whether you all get approval to come to Edinburgh for 3/4 days.

Otherwise, we'll do the tour again. We've learned a lot, and we know we can improve on it.

But we need your feedback on the format for 2010.