PrideCAF 2026 – Financial Breakdown

We have said it in all the information we’ve put out: 2026 was our biggest year yet, and it felt like it; three days after the event, we were still feeling it both physically and mentally. As organisers, we put our bodies and minds through some trials, as on the day we have a heady mix of adrenaline and anxiety. Once it’s all said and done, we feel drained and yet full. We are proud of PrideCAF, and we can’t thank everyone who attended, exhibited, and volunteered enough.

We thought it might be interesting to give you a peek behind the so-called curtain at what goes into organising our event. We want to be as honest as we can, and share the joy and troubles you might face running an event like ours.

So let’s start with something juicy… costs. Putting on PrideCAF requires us to put a whole bunch of things in place, and a lot of them cost money. Most of these costs are covered by the money we make on table sales, but some have in the past come from external funding. This was our first year without any major external funding, and we thought the extra table sales might leave us with some funds left over. In reality, we were a bit shocked when we realised we had overspent. Please see the breakdown comparing 2024 and 2026 below.

As you can see, our venue costs came down. Given the additional space we had, and that we were able to house more exhibitors, providing both a chill-out space and a quiet room is a huge bonus for the festival. As an organisation, we need to manage event costs carefully. The major additions to the event costs are

• Table Hire because of the extra exhibitors.
• Radio hire so we can cover the building and provide accessibility.
• Some additional printing costs.
• Photographer hire was a slight increase.
• Art & design costs

It should come as no shock to you that we, as creators ourselves, believe in paying artists & performers for their work! In previous years, Nathan has somehow found the time to do the art, and we have not taken any money out of our funds to pay him for that work, which we know is a bit hypocritical. This year, Nathan couldn’t do this, so we commissioned Savion to produce something for us. We loved what Savion produced for us, and considering how much we used their work, their fee was incredibly reasonable. We also had an increase in the design fee for our programme after significant changes and delays.

Running something this big is not cheap by any means, so even though we were able to pull in more exhibitors, that was not enough to cover all the costs.

What would we do differently?

Formally… funding. We know we need to cut down on some festival costs, but we also know that to keep it going, we need to secure funding. If we are considering running for 2027, we need more funding.

• We cannot really change how much our tables cost; we order what we need because our supplier (Stella Events) lets us change the number of tables close to the event, so we order as few tables as possible.
• We hired 10 radios and did not use them all during the day, so there is something we can do there.
• We made a run to Costco to get snacks and water, which is also included in our costs. One thing we didn’t realise is that because Sparks is a sustainable building, they don’t allow plastic bottles. They made an exception for us, and we appreciate it; however, next time we will not be able to provide water bottles for our exhibitors. This will bring the event cost down a bit.
• Art costs increased significantly, and we want to use queer creators to create work for the festival, but that’s a good argument for funding.

If you are planning to have a map of exhibitors at your event, you need to decide what the layout will look like. This comes with the risk of the layout changing because some exhibitors might not be able to make the festival, and you need to make some snap, last-minute decisions. We can adjust our process a bit so our designer and printer don’t have to work as hard and can charge less.