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Raising money for an event

Charging for tickets raises money and reduces number of no-shows
Find monetary and in-kind sponsors

Handling sponsor funds:

Most sponsors want to pay an organization, not an individual. Funds can be run through a supporting non-profit. Alternately, you can create a new non-profit organization, but this requires a certain amount of overhead and work—board meetings, paperwork, legal requirements, etc.

The Ignite speaker survey

Scott Berkun, an Ignite speaker, surveyed 150 speakers who had participated in short-form speaking events (90% were Igniters). He asked eight questions. The results in their entirety can be found here: http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/ignite-how-speakers-prepare/

Here are some of the highlights:

Ignite is creating new speakers:

Most of the speakers are not particularly experienced. More than 50% are occasional speakers or have almost no experience at all. Ignite might be effective at giving visibility to people who don’t often get it or aren’t usually attracted to the stage.

People don't practice enough:

Over 60% of respondents practiced around 10 times and over 30% practiced under 6.

Ignite needs more women onstage:

Of Ignite speakers, 78% are male and 22% are female.
The audiences are awesome and people are psyched they gave their talk:
According to the survey, 54% of speakers thought the audience was easier to speak in front of than a "normal" event (only 8% thought it was harder). 98.6% of respondents said they were glad that they participated.

Attendee's Demographics

Info taken from four Ignites from August to October, 2009 (Seattle, Salt Lake City, Boston, Sebastopol):
Age: 55% are under 35, 27% are 35–44
Education: 81% have a BA degree or higher
Job title: 47% have hands-on technology jobs: Software development/programming (29%); web design & development (11%); game developer (1%); sys/network admin (4%); database administration (2%)
Income: 55% earn more than $50K, 19% more than $100K
Gender: 64% male, 35% female