Drupalcamp Belgium script: how we run our event

1 October 2026
Drupalcon audience

Well, you want to organize the Belgian DrupalCamp, or maybe an event just like it? These are all the things I think about when running our camp.

The first thing you need to do is find a location and a date, because finding those is probably the hardest part. We usually send emails to a few higher education institutes and hope we can find one which is not too bad for price.

Your venue should have one big auditorium where you can seat your entire conference, for us that is at most ~250 people, it should have a smaller auditorium as well, where about half is enough. If both can be the same size, this is preferred.  You also need to have 2 classrooms, one for drupal-in-a-day and one for general contribution. Preferably you also have room you can lock yourself to use a storage box overnight. You should also check if that venue has it's own catering (and how expensive it is), and if they can support wifi for all the attendees.

Once you have your date, you can start calculating backwards in time. Lanyards, wayfinding panels, floorstickers (if needed/allowed and the venue doesn't have their own system), sponsor banners and speaker gifts etc are first priority, because they take some time, and the amount can be fixed before most of the tickets get sold.

  • Lanyards: As soon as the platinum sponsors are known.
  • Wayfinding systems: look if that can be arranged cheaply, or together with other stuff that needs to be printed
  • Sponsor banners and [coffee/healthy snack/socials pancartes]: as soon as all the sponsors are known
  • Speaker gifts: 50 pieces for a camp to have some for the volunteers too. The sooner you order, the more options there are
  • Tshirts, hoodies at least 2 weeks ahead of the deadline, 3 weeks is better. This is also the deadline where we update the tickets to late bird prices. We order the double of what is ordered with the tickets, and if the design is cool and the print is quality they usually get sold out.
  • Badges: 50 empty ones (with a pale writeable area), have a solid timing plan depending on where you print, and organise with them for the files with the names to be sent as late as possible.

Talking about ticket prices, in 2026 our prices were 85 euro for the first 25 tickets we sold, 100 EUR for the rest, except for the late bird pricing, which was 140 euro. We prefer to have people use the normal pricing as much as possible, because that means we know the amount of attendees further in advance.

Let's get back to our timeline, preferably you have your sessions selected at least 4 weeks before the print deadline, so 6 weeks before the conference start.
You also want to have your submissions open for a while before the session submission deadline, let's say another 6 weeks, 5 weeks where you say it is open and one week extra if you would like to convince some more speakers.
So 12 weeks before conference start is a good aim to have, but if you can manage more that's okay. Sessions will only start coming in the last 2-3 days though. Put your deadline in pretalx a couple of hours after the deadline you communicate, you'd be surprised how close people cut it to the deadline.

Ticket sales only start getting up to speed once the schedule is known. And usually a few weeks before the event actually takes place a lot of companies place orders for their employees.

So the event planning timeline looks like this:

  • Event date.
  • Event -1 week: Last communication to the venue about the food requirements, add 30% of attendees.
  • Event -2 weeks: Order double the shirts/hoodies. have a plan for the badges
  • Event -3 weeks: Finish ordering all physical print stuff except shirts/hoodies/badges.
  • Event -5 weeks: Get your volunteers insured and get event insurance.
  • Event -6 weeks: Session submission deadline, confirm sessions, create and publish the schedule.
  • Event -8 weeks: If you are contracting out an AV crew for session recording, contact them now.
  • Event -12 weeks: Open session submissions

So once you have started finding your date, organize meetings every two weeks, we do it over lunch because that means we don't mess with people's other schedules. During this meeting we discuss financial status, tickets sold, sponsor acquired, session updates and we use that time to send any emails or other things as needed. People can skip meetings if needed, but we keep a running notes document and use a slack channel to communicate questions and to-do's for everyone.

Finding sponsors is another story, but generally the spread of sponsors we want is: 2x platinum sponsors - they get a booth and a room named after them, 4x gold sponsor - they get a booth as well, several smaller silver sponsors, they only get a rollup banner to be placed and some others (coffee, snacks, social events, ...) as well. Without sponsors you cannot run an event, so if they have questions be accommodating, but make sure that the highest levels still get the most visibility. 

Most of all, this should be a fun time for all involved, so have fun during organizing as well!