A few ideas on financial aid

This is part of the Less Obvious Conference Checklist.

Introduction

Many conferences now run a financial aid program (also called scholarships or grants) to help people attend who might otherwise not be able to, because they can’t afford to. It may be harder for them to afford to attend due to not having an employer that will cover costs, low or no income, having financial dependents, high health care costs, or many other reasons.

The financial aid will typically cover anywhere between a free ticket, to a ticket with accommodation and travel costs. Sometimes not all applicants require their entire trip to be paid for. As there are typically more applicants than places, there is often some kind of selection process.

It’s incredibly valuable to help people, who might otherwise not be able to attend a conference, so it’s great that so many conferences do this. However, having looked at and asked questions about many of these programs, I developed some thoughts on improvements that could be made. I want to expand this into a wider guide to financial aid, but these are the most common issues I see.

These ideas are suggestions. They may not work for all conferences, and you may have good reasons to deviate. I assume everyone runs these programs with the best intentions, even if something is not ideal, and encourage you to approach these programs and organisers in that same spirit. I focus a lot on aid programs aimed at underrepresented groups, as these seem to be the most common.

Asking for help is hard

The first thing to realise is that asking for help is hard for many people. And that means asking for financial aid can make people feel quite uncomfortable. In financial aid, it’s always easy to make up reasons why you shouldn’t apply. What if other people need it more, and have had less opportunity to go to conferences in the past? What if I’m not part of the target group and I’m defrauding the program by applying? What if I’m not experienced enough and someone else would take more out of it? What if I already had another grant in the past? Do I actually deserve to go?

Strange Loop does a great job by addressing such questions directly, by writing:

With it being easy for people to feel discomfort and insecurity about applying, it’s important that we put extra effort into ensuring everyone feels welcome to apply.

Be extremely explicit in who you are targeting

It is common for conferences to use their financial aid as a tool to improve diversity. Therefore, they often specify something like this:

Anyone from an underrepresented group in tech is invited to apply for this scholarship. This includes, but is not limited to: women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, and people facing economic or social hardships.

Although this is done with the best intentions, here’s my issue with this text: could you tell me who the other underrepresented groups are that are invited? Are people with mental health issues included, and classed under disabled? Are refugees included? People over 50? People who have never worked with the platform the conference focuses on before? People who are doing a career switch? People who have children that increase costs and make planning harder? People whose parents depend upon them? People who can work, but have high medical costs?

Knowing whether some aspect of you is underrepresented can be hard to determine, especially in aspects that are not easily visible. And there’s more: assuming people with mental illness are included under disabled, when do they qualify? Does it need to have a serious impact on your daily life? Do you need a formal diagnosis from a doctor? If you’re genderqueer, but do not currently present differently from your assigned gender, are you included in the LBGTQIA+? Who is included in that plus? What if you’re not even sure yourself about your identity?

For Django: Under the Hood 2016, we tried to improve on this with the following text, inspired from AlterConf:

Anyone from an underrepresented group in tech is invited to apply for this scholarship. This includes, but is not limited to:

This doesn’t address all these questions entirely, but it is a lot more explicit than the shorter list. Note that we haven’t actually changed our target group: we already meant to include all these people. All of them were already welcome to apply. However, I seriously doubt any refugees, caregivers or neurodiverse people would have applied with our briefer text.

The more explicit you can be, the better. If someone is part of a group that you haven’t explicitly mentioned, as much as you intend to include them, you raise a much higher barrier for them to apply.

It’s fine to have a different target group, or to not limit on target group at all. Some conferences run aid programs exclusively for women (in which case you should be specific regarding inclusion of trans and non-binary people) or entirely different groups. Do make sure you are consistent: if you say in one place that your program is for women, and in another place have a more extensive list, there is a fair chance many non-women won’t feel welcome to apply.

Whichever target group you choose, be it anyone interested in attending or a much more specific group, be explicit, expansive, and consistent.

Be mindful of excluding people with your requirements

Some aid programs include accommodation, and expect applicants to share their rooms with other applicants of “the same gender”. That makes complete sense from a cost perspective: with the same budget, you can provide aid to more people, and have a bigger impact on the community.

However, it can also lead to unintentional exclusion of some people that are explicitly part of your target group. For example, some neurodiverse people are unable to share rooms, as they need their private space to withdraw into, or have other specific access needs. If you require room sharing, these people can not participate. It also creates weird situations for trans and non-binary people.

This doesn’t mean you can’t share any rooms: it’s perfectly fine to suggest it. However, be mindful in how you communicate: people should feel comfortable saying they need a private room, and this should be an option in your application form. If this is only possible after raising the issue by e-mail, for example, these applicants are more likely to just skip their application.

Never ask people which underrepresented group they belong to

If your aid program is aimed at underrepresented groups, it may make sense to ask people which group they are part of. You might consider this in your screening proces to ensure everyone is part of your target group. In my opinion, this is incredibly harmful.

First of all, you usually can’t actually screen whether people are eligible this way. Typically the target group includes aspects that you can’t check, like invisible health issues or being LGBTQIA+. Therefore, anyone applying in bad faith could just lie.

More importantly, people might be very private about their exact situation, because this information coming out can have serious consequences for their life. Some people live in countries where they can be persecuted for their identity, or depend on others from whom they must hide their identity. In many countries, your health status can make it hard for you to keep or find work. Some people might feel shame for their situation, such as people experiencing poverty.

In other words, if you are asking people which exact group they belong to, you are asking some of them to put themselves in danger. At best, you are making them feel uncomfortable. And although this does not apply to everyone, these dangers are probably more common in people that are already underrepresented in multiple other ways.

On timing

There are two important concerns about timing: announcing the results on time, and when grant recipients will receive their refund.

Flights and accomodation become more expensive and less available as the date of your event nears. If you announce your results too late, the costs for your grant recipients will go up. This means they may need extra funds, draining your budget, or will no longer be able to come.

Some conferences only pay back grant recipients at the actual conference. This makes the program inaccessible to people who can’t cover such a large sum so far in advance. However, if you simply transfer the funds in advance, that can increase the risk of fraud. A middle ground that we chose for Django Under the Hood is refunding people as soon as we have proof of booking of their flight or accomodation. Our process ensured that they nearly always received these funds within one week. This limits the time during which they have to cover the cost. In exceptional cases, where even this was not possible for the recipient, we were able to find a community member to confirm the recipient was legit, and transferred the funds in advance.

Be mindful that in rare cases, a grant recipient may not be able to come to your event after all. They might fall ill, or urgently need to take care of someone else, or may be rejected entry into the country despite having a valid visa and all paperwork. This disproportianally affects people who are underrepresented in multiple ways. Only refunding the grant to people who manage to come to the conference, means these people have very high unexpected costs. This is not a concern with the model we used for Django Under the Hood.

Generally, under no condition should you require attendees to commit to costs until they are sure you will to refund those costs to them (up to the limit of their grant).

Be open about your selection process

Most aid programs get more applications than they can grant. So there needs to be some kind of selection process. When scoring applications for Django: Under the Hood in the past, the basic question for me was: How can we maximise the impact on the applicants, their local community, our community in general and people in general, within the limited resources available to us?

I liked to look at:

However, those criteria were not published, so that made our selection process potentially less fair.

Another interesting approach is to assign tickets randomly, considering how easy it is to introduce unintended bias into your selection process. You can actually have this entire process run for you with Diversity Tickets

Your conference might have other priorities. Perhaps students and teachers are important to you, and you’ll prioritise them over others. It’s also very common to prioritise accepted speakers over anyone else.

Further reading

Thanks

I’ve taken inspiration and/or had some nice e-mail exchanges with organisers of: