The SICKENING Profits Running Pride Events

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Pride events can make their organizers a fortune while telling you they’re barely scraping by. They operate with no oversight, minimal transparency, and a whole lot of cash. So, let’s pull back the curtain on how much pride events really make because as you’ll see, they can do a whole lot better to help the community we all serve.

INTRO

It’s 6 am here at the town park in Bloomsburg, PA. It’s pouring rain but in a few short hours, this field will be filled with 100 vendors and food trucks who signed up 6 months ago to be here. The band shell in the corner will have a DJ setting up his gear, and drag performers will be getting on their costumes backstage. 

A “rain or shine” policy means some vendors are driving their cars in the mud and start setting up hours before showtime. Other vendors choose to forfeit their vendor fee and stay home. Food trucks start to prep their trucks with a literal ton of food. But thanks to mother nature, only a few dozen people will come out to an event everyone expected to have over 1,000 people.

If it’s your first time at a pride event or if it’s an annual destination, you likely realize that putting on an event this large is a monumental task which takes a team of people months to put together…or in the case of one of my good friends who runs a true nonprofit, she can put together a pride event, ten times this size in just two weeks. 

You might have heard that events collect money from a wide range of sources and spend most, if not all that money on the expenses it takes to run an event this large. Other community and corporate events of this size cost thousands of dollars for lighting and sound, permits, rentals, security, and more. But pride events are unique. 

See, about a year ago, we set out to make an episode to show you how to start a pride event. Our goal was to collect financial data from every pride event across Pennsylvania so we could accurately provide you with average costs. 

But that’s easier said than done. Out of 50 real pride events, large and small, we could only find 2 that publish any transparency info. In a minute, we’ll show you how even these two publications are, in our opinions, questionable at best. But the rest of these events never seem to publish any financials. 

They collect thousands of dollars but they only file this tax form, a 990-N, nicknamed the “postcard” for how easy it is to file. There’s no oversight or reporting to the IRS of where their money comes from or where it goes. If your nonprofit makes less than $50,000 per year normally, you simply check mark this one box on this one question form and you’re done. 

So instead, we had to send right-to-know requests and back trace financial data of 50 real events. For the record, all of the data we collected is linked in the description of this episode.

After a year of hard work, we stumbled into a hornet’s nest with a lot of red tape protecting a rainbow with a literal pot of gold at the end of it. 

So, let’s go back to our example. The first thing you’ll need is a place to hold your event. If you were to rent this beautiful town park for the entire weekend, it would be a staggering $0. Yep. You heard that right, it would be absolutely free to rent the park for the entire weekend.

That free price tag includes the use of the band shell where the drag performers and musicians will play. It includes the public restrooms, parking, the grass field for vendors, and electricity. 

In fact, 39% of events we’ve researched took place in a town park. But more than a third of those venues charge less than $100, with most of the other parks charging reasonable rates under $500.

If you’re hosting your event somewhere else, the rental fees might increase a little, but not by much. Another 39% of events we’ve researched required police to block off entire city blocks for their events. But 61% of towns charged less than $100 for the street closure. Only a few towns charged more than $200, and one small town is our outlier, charging $3,100. 

If you plan to rent out a fairgrounds for your event, there were 2 events we could not collect data on in this category but for the other 2 that were able to acquire, one venue charges $350 and the other charges $3,250.

4 events in our data chose to go indoors so they could be air conditioned but the average cost we found for renting a convention center was about $1,500, with the lowest being $350 and the highest being $3,000.

Of course, if you’re one of the 2 organizations we found that already owns a big plot of land that you can lend to the cause, this rental fee is non-existent. 

So, depending on where you want your event to take place, you can expect to pay anywhere from $0 to $3,250 for the rental of the location itself. 

The next thing you’ll need is general liability insurance. This covers your organization if anyone slips and falls at your event and decides to sue you for their injuries. It also covers you for slander if you bad mouth your vendors a few weeks later on social media - which one Pride event reportedly did to us - or your performers have a fist fight in the parking lot. 

Many venues require proof of general liability insurance to rent their location, especially ones owned by the government. But while it may not be a requirement, it’s always a good idea to have. And for the low price of just $340 per 1,000 attendees, it’s insanely cheap. 

Next, you’ll want to get the word out about your event. Social media makes it free to post and it’s also free to reach out to local press outlets to do stories on your event. So, advertising is free. 

But as the media covers your event, you might start to see homophobes online threatening to protest. So, you might decide that you need security. Sadly, some pride events we’ve seen never had any security at all. But good organizers hire ample security. 

If you bring in a celebrity or influencer, they’re going to make security a requirement. It’s something I and many other influencers have in our contract because while we do offer exposure to a wide audience, we’re also telling bad actors where and when to find us. Thus, armed security is a requirement most of us have. 

Private security guards cost an average of $45 per hour across the United States. If you want them to carry guns or tasers, which I highly recommend, considering pride events are a massive target, it’s just an extra $5 per hour.

In an ideal world, event directors would listen to the experts who say: for every 50 people, you need one armed security officer. But many events don’t follow this industry rule and hire just 2 or 3 officers for 1,000 people. This means, what should cost them $5,000 or more, likely costs them less than $500 - and that’s only if they hire security at all. 

It’s worth noting that if an event hires armed security officers, the cost of their general liability insurance usually goes down because the event is mitigating the risk by implementing a preventative measure. 

Next, you’re going to need a DJ to provide thousands of dollars of lighting and sound equipment. But after doing over 4,000 live events in my career and hearing from industry leaders across the country, I can almost guarantee the DJ working at your local pride event is donating all of their time and equipment. 

Along those same lines, you might see a dozen or so drag performers on stage throughout the day. They all spent dozens of hours designing their outfits. They put together their own mix of music and rehearse for hours to make sure they give a great performance. But one of the worst kept secrets is that none of the drag performers get paid to be there. 

You might notice drag queens and kings going around the audience towards the end of their routine to collect tips. The sad truth is: that’s the only money they get for their talents. And to their credit, many times drag performers even share a percentage of their tips with the DJ. 

Most events also have a small, live band performing between drag shows. But most of these bands donate all of their time too. A few events we’ve researched do pay musicians a small fee but most times, this doesn’t equal their normal event rate. 

As for large pride events like Washington, New York, or San Francisco, they are likely to have A-list celebrities come in as a featured performance. But here is where we would like to note two things: First, these large city events have massive corporations donating thousands of dollars each. Second, there is no way to know for sure what these celebrities are paid without actually seeing their private contracts. 

It’s sort of a toss-up. A record label might want their artist to perform at a large event like this to gain new fans. So, the record label might front the bill for the whole show for this exposure. But the event is benefiting massively from the name recognition, so they might need to pay for that privilege.

What we know for certain is that if these celebrities are paid to perform, there is plenty of corporate sponsor money to counter that expense.

One Pride event we found claims they spend 25% of their event expenses on entertainment and performers. But fun story, we know many of their performers and their DJ so we asked around. In fact, their DJ spoke up publicly about this. None of them claim they were paid a penny. But maybe they have a different definition of entertainment expenses than we do so we’ll leave that up to you to decide for yourself.

There are some other expenses you might not think about at first, like restrooms. Some events luck out with their location having public restrooms like convention centers, parks, or fairgrounds but with street events, you’re going to need portable restrooms. 

Experts recommend one unit per 50 people, which would mean events with 1,000 attendees would require 20 units. But most events we’ve researched with 1,000 people or more will only get 2 units. 

Across the U.S., portable restrooms average about $100 per unit, per day. It’s worth noting that extras like handwashing stations might add to this cost. And if your event is in a remote area, that will increase the delivery fee. But usually pride events are held in more public areas anyway.

Venues might charge a minimal fee for trash removal or repairs if you break something. Other event organizers spend a hundred bucks on a banner and some decorations. But overall, these minor fees never add up to anything substantial worth noting here. 

And that’s it. Those are all of the expenses that pride events usually have. 

So, how are we going to pay for it all? In a perfect world, you would take your cost and divide it evenly between everyone who wants to have a vendor space and everyone who wants to sponsor you. But not everyone wants the same thing or approaches you at the same time, so you need a price list. 

From the 50 real events we’ve researched, for a 10 x 10 foot vendor space, most small town events charge $50 for businesses, $25 for nonprofits, and $150 for food trucks. But if you include medium and large events, we found businesses paid an average of $129. Nonprofits paid $77 and food trucks paid $341 for the same amount of space. 

Keep in mind, in most small towns, food trucks are also required by the city to get a temporary license before selling food, which most times can cost these trucks an extra $50 to $500 per day. And one small town that we came across in our research, requires food vendors to give the town a percentage of their sales on top of that licensing fee at the end of each event which is ridiculous.

You might think it’s weird how our community flaunts itself as treating everyone equally, meanwhile the directors of our pride events are charging everyone different prices. Even in cases where nonprofits are selling similar or sometimes the same exact merchandise as businesses and food trucks, on average, for-profit vendors pay 168 times more, and food trucks pay 445 times more for the same amount of space.

Less than a handful of events we researched had the same fees no matter which type of vendor you were but others were just outrageous. One event charging nonprofits $125 and businesses $200, was charging food trucks $4,500 each. And if you remember the cost breakdown from a moment ago, this means, if you sold one food truck space, you’d pay for the entire event and everything else would be pure profit.

Most small pride events in our data had about 100 vendors with a 50/50 split between businesses and nonprofits. Most also had about 5 food trucks on average. 

This means, with vendor fees alone, most events with standard pricing already collect $4,500. Average pricing means they collect about $12,000, and with the most expensive fees we found for a medium sized event, they collect over $105,000 from vendors alone.

But wait, there’s more. Companies and people love to get their name on things for recognition. So, pride events offer sponsorship tiers. Usually smaller events offer tiers from 10 to $10,000. Medium events can offer tiers up to $15,000, and large events can offer tiers in the 6 or 7-figure range.

In fact, by far the smallest event we found publicly claims to bring in more than $7,500 in sponsorships. A medium sized event that publishes their entire list of vendors and sponsors brought in over $211,500 in this category. And while large city pride events have much larger expenses, they can also bring in millions from sponsorships alone. 

Sometimes, an event will list a billboard company or TV network as a sponsor in exchange for use of a billboard nearby or an ad on their local news. But for a majority of cases, sponsors are writing a check in exchange for this exposure. 

But the money’s just starting to flow. See, a thousand people are going to show up and every one of those people have a wallet which didn’t even open for us yet. Most events leave their fans alone but others make the most of every opportunity. 

Some events choose to sell merchandise like t-shirts and mugs. Sure, they need a few hundred dollars to get started buying supplies but the design itself is many times donated. Pride events will run a contest for a design where the winner gets to see their design on all of the merchandise. So, the only cost to the event organizer is buying supplies.

One Pride event we found publishes their estimated yearly budget which claims they’ll spend $1,000 on merchandise and only bring in $1,000 selling it. But as anyone selling anything knows, that’s not how merchandise works. You don’t sell merchandise at cost. 

And considering their food trucks pay $450 each but in that same budget, they only claim to collect $250 total in vendor fees, it makes us question the credibility of this estimated budget, which they publish as a financial transparency report.

4 events we found require attendees to pay a ticket price to get in. One of them charges $10 per person to watch the drag show. Another charges $10 to enter the vendor area and watch the concert. 

Another charges $8 per person, plus an 83-cent credit card fee because you seemingly have to buy tickets online before going in person. And one event charges $5 per person which is donated to a charity helping transgender youth but the vendors at that same event don’t have to pay anything. 

But wait, there’s more. According to government reports, pride events routinely get federal and state tourism grants which could give events an extra $4,000 or more. They collect donations the rest of the year which can help generate up to $10,000 more. And they conduct galas and other fundraisers to help raise even more income. 

If you add up all of these factors, small events on a city street or town park can bring in $12,500. Even with the worst expenses and fees we could find for those venues, they can still profit 7 to $8,500. 

Our fairgrounds example could bring in $13,500 but cost just $4,200. So, it profited us over $9,300. 

Convention centers can hold more people and generally they are something pride events grow towards. So, while they can cost $7,300 with more insurance coverage and security, they can generate about $350,000 of income or more. That means they can profit $341,700. 

But you might be still wondering about that park we showed you at the top of the episode. Remember, it would only cost you $340 total but now, thanks to all of these factors, it could bring in $12,000 of income so we can take home more than $11,000 of profit.

Sure, it rained all day and the vendors only had the chance to see about 30 people. It was bright and sunny all day Sunday so we could have postponed to the next day for free. But in fairness to our completely fictitious organizers, the banks in Bloomsburg are closed on Sundays so it’d be pretty hard to cash that check if we postponed.

For the record, we sent right to know requests to dozens of cities. We investigated official event websites for sponsor and vendor fees. They all publicly share how many vendors and sponsors they have, but who’s going to sit there and do math to figure out how much they make? Venues, contractors, and more helped us with this episode by sharing their professional opinions for what these items would cost in those regions.

But aside from all the evidence we collected, perhaps the most damning piece of the puzzle comes from Scottdale. The venue they rented for their pride event is reportedly one of the most expensive venues to rent from all of our data. However, the amount they charged vendors and sponsors was one of the lowest we found, far below average pricing. Yet, they seemingly still made money. 

So, even if you were to pay the most expensive rental fee for a venue we can find. Pay top dollar for insurance. Have expert-recommended levels of armed security. Pay your DJ, drag performers, and musicians fairly. And get more portable restrooms. 

Even if you charged all vendors fairly, losing some money on food trucks but gained it back on nonprofits who should pay the same amount for the same space. Let’s say you never sold any merchandise or tickets to get in. You never sought out any government grants, extra donations, or held any other fundraisers…you would still make a profit from doing a pride event. 

At this point, it’s not really a question of “do pride events make a profit?” and more a question of “what do they do with it all?” So, I want to answer that too. Some organizations running these events have resource centers or health clinics that require money to operate the rest of the year. So, any profit from those events are set aside to pay for those expenses.

But for many other events, we can’t find any evidence of the money going anywhere. Board members and directors seem to be volunteers with no payment for their time. In the age of technology, they generally use free video calling services like facebook messenger to meet and plan everything instead of renting a meeting space.

It’s extremely rare to see a nonprofit like this at the center of embezzlement charges. And I want to be extra clear, the extremely rare cases that we found of this did NOT include any of the 50 events mentioned in this episode. Nonprofits don’t pay taxes on their income. And they don’t have many other expenses year round other than maybe a website, costing them a few hundred dollars.

In asking around, some directors told us they save net profits in a fund to hopefully do something big, like open a clinic or resource center one day in the future. Others use some of that money to be a vendor at other pride events across the area to advertise their event. 

That amazing woman we mentioned a moment ago who organized a pride event in just two weeks, spent that money to build a stonewall history exhibit at her pride event this year so attendees can learn the history of how pride began. 

Two pride events we found, donated their profits to LGBTQ charities and one event we came across, chose to buy a vehicle and have it professionally wrapped with graphics. 

My point is that pride is a business. That’s why when corporations across the U.S. started dropping their sponsorships this year, it hurt pride events but it luckily didn’t kill them off.

Over the past year, we found starting a pride event is very inexpensive. As long as you’re honest with people and handle money well, it’s never been easier to run an event like this. 

In different regions outside of our data, these costs might vary. In some countries, security can’t carry a lethal weapon. But I would argue, if your costs go up from our professional estimates, so do your fees. 

While some events use their profits for great things like history exhibits and clinics, I would argue the other events could do a lot better. 

We’ve already shown how they could hire proper levels of security officers and they could treat food vendors fairly by charging equal vendor fees. 

But they could also work with a local construction company to rent concrete barriers surrounding their event so no bad actors could use a vehicle as a weapon. They could rent metal detectors so it’s harder for bad actors to sneak in weapons. 

They could donate any remaining profits to a local shelter helping LGBTQ people. Or they could just not charge as much money to begin with because the very definition of “nonprofit” means you’re not supposed to be making a profit.

And look, I started a nonprofit in 2006 and am proud to say that group is still going strong even though I left it to my co-director when I went to college. But as someone who ran a nonprofit and worked for many others, trust me when I say the system we have in place right now is broken. The system basically just relies on you being a good person. 

That’s why I feel all nonprofit organizations, no matter their size or what they do, should be required by law to publish their full financials to the federal tax authorities in their country and to the public. We should be able to see their actual finances of where every dollar comes from and where every penny goes. 

The only public records we have right now are these abysmal 990-N forms which only ask one single question. This allows nonprofits to operate with no oversight, transparency, or accountability. For context, our TV show files a Schedule C tax form that ends up being about 30 pages long which has to explain all of our expenses and income.

99.9% of nonprofits do great work with the money they collect. But they’re asking for OUR donations so even the ones doing great work should have nothing to hide here.

You might think all the venues, contractors, event organizers, and experts we worked with to make this episode are wrong. But we’ll stand by our numbers and estimations. We just want nonprofits to do the same.

We don’t say any of this to badmouth anyone. I’m sure event organizers have the best of intentions to help our community and they fulfill every legal requirement they currently have by filing this postcard form. We’re only sharing minor suggestions for those in our audience who might want to start a pride event but don’t know where to start. And for those who might want to improve their event in the future. 

Because, as you’ve seen, I think it’s obvious that we all care about the community we serve. But I think you’ve also seen by now that with minor changes, we can serve that community SO much better in the future.

OUTRO