Experimenting towards financial sustainability

Bondi Innovation Alliance’s vision is for Bondi region to become a world-class innovation hub, and along that journey catalysing as much value as possible for the talented innovators who live and here.

In order to continue our work pursuing this vision we need to be financially sustainable. At launch and even now, we don’t know how we will achieve that, though we have many ideas. The intention is to experiment with different models and find what works.

Bondi Innovation Alliance is intended to be ‘By the community, for the community‘. Your input as a member is vital in shaping what we become, so let us know what you think!

Setup and ongoing costs

There of course have been significant costs to date including branding strategy, brand creation, user experience testing, front-end graphic design, and licensing and customising the online community platform.

Our ongoing costs include software licenses, software development, and paying local Bondi team members for graphic design, social media, content, video and event coordination.

Starting premises

One of the first premises is that basic membership of the community platform should always be free. There should be no barriers to impede bringing as broad a range of talented innovators onto the platform as possible.

Another premise is that as much as possible of our spending should be on Bondi talent, supporting the local community.

Any financial surpluses will be spent on creating value for the Bondi innovation community.

Charging for meetups and events

Our first experiment with helping to cover our costs and continuing to create value for the Bondi community is charging a small fee for our meetups and workshops.

From now we will charge $10 to attend our meetups. Most workshops we will charge $20.

Again as an experiment, if someone who is not a paid team member of Bondi Innovation Alliance organises and hosts an event, we are happy to pay them half the revenue if they wish, as long as they have an ABN.

Given the low registration fees and sharing the revenue we will need to run plenty of meetups and events each month to get close to covering costs. However trying this will put us on a course towards being financially sustainable and able to continue supporting the community

Becoming financially transparent

Since we are in essence a community organisation, we intend to publish all our financials, so our members can see in full detail our costs and revenues.

This “open book management” will allow members to have confidence that the organisation is truly designed and run for their benefit.

We are working on processes so we can share regular updates on our financials.

Help us experiment!

Please let us know your thoughts or if you are interested in hosting meetups or events!