Early Feb 2026 saw just over 90 people from the voiceover industry getting together for a day of fun and frivolity in Manchester city centre. This was the second annual Great Big Voiceover Social, and – as we did last year – we felt it necessary and beneficial to the attendees and would-be attendees to outline our thought processes and costings.
We believe that transparency not only benefits us, but also other event organisers, and helps the wider community understand why these things can often seem expensive to attend.
The first thing to say is that our reasoning for running the event hasn’t changed since last year. So please go and read last year’s blog ‘cos that’ll save me a chunk of time and save me a lot of typing. Go on, off you go. I’ll wait here.
Right, you’re back.
What we did differently this year
As stated in the above linked blog we knew there were changes to be made from last year. Partly tweaking things that we thought hadn’t gone as well as we’d hoped and partly so we weren’t just doing the same thing again.
Rising costs
When we got to actually organising this year’s event we were faced with another challenge – the terrible state of the hospitality industry. I don’t think it’s any great secret that hospitality is facing very testing times. The pandemic saw the industry struggle and since then any hope of making up lost revenue has been all but destroyed by the rising cost of utilities and the double-whammy effect of the cost of living crisis – rising prices for the business and at the same time the would-be customers having less disposable income to be able to afford to go out as much as they did.
This was brought home to us with the cost of the venue hire. We faced a 30% rise in the cost of private hire of the venue, plus a doubling of the minimum bar spend – an 87% increase in total. OUCH!
Last year the bar spend just scraped over the line and we only just made enough on the day. This year we had to do our best to ensure the bar took double what it did last year.
Adjusting the day to make it cheaper to run
This meant we had to bear that in mind as we planned the day. Last year we had a beer tasting event and we had wanted to do something similar this year, but we just couldn’t afford to have several people not potentially putting money over the bar for a couple of hours whilst they tasted produce brought in from outside.
It also meant we had to encourage as many people as possible to buy a with-pie ticket so fewer people would pop out for a takeaway and a can of coke. It also meant we really needed to account for the almost inevitable bar shortfall in the ticket price.
At the end of the day you did us proud and we only needed to pay an extra £1200-ish to meet the minimum spend (for the record, this is the most I’ve ever spent in a pub). Your drinks intake increased about 50% over last year!
Entertainment Changes
We loved last year’s entertainment. Chris Clarkson’s magic and Paul Dela Ross’s dJing brought smiles to so many faces (and some confused looks at Chris – but that’s a good thing!). But we needed different people this year. Enter stage left (or right, I’m not very good at stage directions) Corinne Wilkinson who came to make balloon animals and hats and apply a little facepaint. And for our evening entertainment we hosted the first ever Voiceover Open Mic Night.
Helen and I helped run a highly successful open mic night for over a decade. And having been to events that ran karaoke sessions we knew there are people in the community that have the pipes. But what about those who don’t sing? We are a creative community, so lets let people demonstrate their other talents. I’m more than happy to do sound, Helen would be perfectly capable of hosting, but we needed one of us to be around to run the event. So we hired voiceover and stand up comedian Natalia Schwatz to host. And everyone delivered! We had a full evening of music, poetry, standup, and a little bit of magic (actual real stage magic – I’m not just complimenting everyone for being amazing).
It’s definitely something we’ll look at doing again in future years. Many of those who filled in the feedback forms said the open mic was the highlight of the day – which I had hoped it would be.
How our sponsors support the event
I cannot not mention our sponsors.
We’re very happy to say that nearly all our Gold and Silver sponsors returned again this year. And we had a few new Silver and Bronze Sponsors joining us too!
Without their cash injections this event wouldn’t happen. This year between them they paid almost £5,000 which would have had to be accounted for in the ticket price were they to not attend.
Ticket sales income alone doesn’t cover the costs of running this event, so we really cannot do this without them. THANK YOU!
Looking at the figures
So far so good. But if there is an oliphaunt in the room it has to be the cost of the event.
It remains an objective of ours to make the day as affordable as possible and the figures below will hopefully demonstrate to you that we are keeping things as cheap as we can.
Some of the things we bought last year we bought as long-term purchases (ie the banners etc.) so a bit of money was saved this year, but there was still plenty of things to organise and buy. The ongoing costs of running the Voiceover Social haven’t changed much (around £1,000 per year for things like website, email, podcast & newsletter hosting, accounting & insurance costs etc), but figures from this year’s event are below:
Event-specific costs:
| This year (2026) | Last year (2025) | % difference | |
| Ticket platform & Stripe/Paypal fees | £197 | £240 | -18% |
| Venue hire + minimum bar spend | £5,080 | £2,710 | +87% |
| Food | £1060.40 (£13.05 per ticket sold) | £1,000 (£20.40 per ticket sold) | +6% |
| Entertainment | £500 | £850 | -41% |
| Misc. event costs (banners, lanyards/stickers, volunteers) | £722 | £400 | +80% |
| Party Bags (paper bags, pin badges, stickers, party hats etc) | £374 | £650 | -42% |
| TOTAL Expenses | £6,873 | £4,850 | +34% |
| Total ticket sale income (before fees) | £6,735 | £4,880 | +38% |
| Total sponsorship income (before fees) | £4,978 | £5,600 | -11% |
| Event total Income (before fees) | £11,713 | £10,480 | +12% |
| Total event profit (before time & annual expenses) | £4,840 | £5,630 | -14% |
So what about next year?
Are we doing it again? Yes, we plan to. But we are looking at putting on something much cheaper to allow more people to attend. Some of the options we have for this would be to move out of the city centre (which would make public transport harder but accommodation (and possibly venue hire) cheaper), not providing food, not private-hiring a venue (which would mean we wouldn’t be able to have an expo and therefore we probably wouldn’t be able to get sponsors for the event), or cutting right back on entertainment. Please let us know what you think about these options as this event is for you.
Lastly, a huge thank you to everyone who contributed towards the day. The feedback we received was largely about how much people enjoyed the day. And that is down to everyone who came and smiled.
Hopefully, we’ll see you in 2027.
Photos from the event
If you’d like to remember (or look on in jealousy) at the photos from our 2026 event, you can! Thank you to our amazing photographer Karen Stanilan-Platt for taking these!