2020 TICKETS: All the info, yes all of it!

Things are heating up! Nowhere officially starts in less than 130 days, and although it seems pretty far away, preparations are only getting busier from now on.

This starts, of course, with buying a ticket (remember – no one gets in for free!), which you’ll be able to do in a few weeks. The full juicy details can be found on our Tickets page , but here’s a quick recap about 2020 sale:

WHEN?

The main sales has opened on FEB 15th 

WHERE?

On this website, HERE

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?

The standard ticket price will be 200 €, low income and minors will be 80 €. If you feel extra comfy this year and want to support art at Nowhere, the VIP (Voluntary Inflated Price) tickets will be at 300 €.

Why those prices? See the section bellow.

ANYTHING NEW I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?

New regulations command us to ask for your passport number or European Union ID card number, which we’ll have to hand over to the police, so we’ll be asking that when you buy a ticket.

Wish you could buy your ticket in advance with the cool kids? We’ll have plenty of volunteering options available for you in 2020.

This year, we’ll again be running the Secure Tickets Exchange Program (STEP), so that people who bought a ticket and can’t attend can sell it back (at face value) to others who need one.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No. (and you should find a co-lead)

Take a guess.

Could you explain why those prices and how it was decided?

Yes! Let’s talk about it:

The ticket prices evolve with our overall budget needs. Our main source of income is the sale of tickets.

The income we get from selling ice, water, and bus tickets represent a minuscule fraction of our turnover. Some barrios do pay us for providing them with services, but this is done at cost, and even sometimes at a loss.

We do not receive funding from the state or any other sponsor. We are entirely self-reliant for our budget and that’s the way we want things to be.

Each year, we draft a provisional budget to decide how to allocate our funds. Nowhere has to happen somewhere, so we need to sort out the money questions.
By the way, let’s do a virtual high-five to those who chose to do this for a « no commerce » event!
 
Each lead asks to be allocated a budget in accordance with their financial needs for the event.
There are different types of needs: event critical, nice to have, improvements, and experiments.
The Metaleads collect the budget requests from all leads in their departments and submit them to the FineAnts team by fall. Then, the budgets are decided by FineAnts based on their best judgement and the constraints of all departments. The budgets are approved by the Metaleads, and finally by the Directors, as they are financially responsible for the event finances.
 
This year, following the 2019 All Leads Meeting (ALM), a number of budget requests were submitted, based on our feedback and observations of the 2019 event.
 
At the same time we analyzed these requests, we ran an investigation about budget in general. After two years of data gathering, a number of things became clear: our costs have been rising steadily for the past few years, and our ticket income (both in absolute terms and relative to our population ) has not risen to match them.
 
As a consequence, the submitted 2020 budgets predicted a funding shortfall of around 100,000 €.
In response, we set up a budget working group to investigate what measures could be taken to address this shortfall. Our Finance coordinator made a general call to all leads interested in participating in the budget working group, with input from the Metaleads.
Our Finance coordinator made a general call to all NOrg leads who would be interested in participating in the budget working group.
In total, nine leads and Metaleads volunteered to join the group. They worked together to analyse the budget requests, gathering additional input from all Metaleads. Then, they gave recommendations about where to allocate funding and how to revisit the protocols.

Apart from that, what new exciting things are we going to spend money on in 2020?

In addition to the event critical expenses, the Budget Working Group, the FineAnts team, and the Directors decided to allocate specific funds to:
 

  • Renovate La Cantina (its structure and equipment) and raise the per-person-per-day allocation for feeding the volunteers. This will allow us to give our volunteers better and healthier meals, as well as prevent cross-contamination issues which can threaten their safety.

  • Respond to the community feedback on sound clashes by altering the site layout, which will require preparing the site and adding extra lightning rods.

  • Respond to community feedback on toilets by funding a trial of twenty composting toilets, as part of our efforts to move away from chemical toilets as much as we legally and financially can (each composting unit costs roughly 60% more than a chemical one), and continue the success of the VIPees by ordering an additional two, for a total of four on site.

  • Rent heavy machinery for set up and strike. This will release our volunteers from a lot of heavy manual labour, and make our build and strike operations more efficient and a lot safer.
  • Renovate Toolhaus and fix all our crew bikes. Both are necessary and have been deferred for several years.
  • Respond to community feedback by paying our contractors a more ethical salary, in line with the actual work that they commit to.
  • Maintain our commitment of 10% of our ticket income allocated to art grants, as usual. This will be an estimated 60,000 €, up from 45,000€ in 2019.
  • Work to cover our costs and ensure that we have enough financial reserves to survive an event cancellation and or big emergencies.