The First Great Big VO Social – A Review

25^th Jan 2025 saw 80+ people who work in the voiceover industry come together to socialise in the city centre of Manchester. This was the culmination of almost a year’s hard work. The day was a success. Not flawless, but very much enjoyed by all who attended.

A huge thank you to everyone who came – those who sponsored us, bought tickets and volunteered on the day. Your support means the word to us both.

Now the dust has settled and we have a bit of perspective on the whole shebang it seems like a good chance to explain our thoughts and reasoning behind what we did and how we think it all went. Plus some rumination about what may lay ahead if we decide to do it all again (spoiler alert – we’re doing it all again).

Why We Did It

One of the first things we did when we took over the VO Social was announce that we would be holding a great big social so that people from all over the UK (and beyond) could come together in a social fashion. Due to timescales, 2024 was an online meet up which was lots of fun and went on quite late (if I remember correctly), but 2025 was always billed as an in-person event.

And so it happened – the first Great Big Voiceover Social (GBVOS) took place at 53two in Manchester city centre. A full 12 hour event where we could all get together and just hang out. No talks, no workshops, no agenda. A splendid time was guaranteed for all. But why?

We love working in the Voiceover community. We find it to be genuinely supportive, friendly and accepting. In these times that’s something worth celebrating, supporting and strengthening. The local VO Social meet-ups do that (and a huge THANK YOU to the local organisers of those meet-ups. Without you guys none of this would be possible – obvs!). It sort of feels ‘right’ that we should also come together all together and have a giant celebration of this beautiful industry. So we did.

We started it because love going to conferences. We love the chance to get together with the voice over community to learn, consider our career paths, expand our horizons, and recharge our batteries and enthusiasm. There is a great need for the learning opportunities that conferences bring. But in our conversations with voiceovers we recognised a yearning for something a little bit different. We saw a desire for a conference without the ‘conference’ bits. A chance to come together as a community and enjoy the company of other voice actors without the sitting-though-talks bit. And we saw a need for this to be more affordable than a full conference package plus hotel.

And so we came up with the GBVOS. An answer to those wishes. A bare bones ticket that gets you entry to the event (and a pie) but that you can add on whatever else you wish – choose your own price point for your accommodation, take part in a free or paid add-on if you wish, or ignore all that and just sit at the bar all day. More of a festival than a conference.

“It was a very well planned event and a great opportunity to have 1-to-1s with industry experts, as well as networking with other VOs. The industry definitely needs more in person events like this!”

“I can’t recommend The Great Big Voice Over Social enough! It’s such a welcoming and supportive space for voice actors of all levels to connect, share experiences, and learn from one another.”

Choosing the Venue and Suppliers

Step one was to find a venue. We wanted the event to be in Manchester. Partly because it’s where we live and so organising things would be much easier, but also – and more importantly – because transport links to Manchester are very good and it being fairly central means no-one has to travel from one end of the UK to the other. We both love living in Manchester, and so the opportunity to show it off was grasped with both hands.

We approached over a dozen different venues and got prices from many of them. One of our big aims was to keep the ticket price affordable, and the prices we received from most of the potential hotel-type venues would not have fulfilled that wish. One of the venues wanted to charge us £12,000 for only 4 hours. On top of the venue hire they all also had a minimum bar spend of several thousand pounds that most wanted paying up front. Our little glum faces when we got quote after quote that had simply unaffordable up-front costs told a sad story, but we did have a couple of aces up our sleeve – we had eyes on 2 venues that would fit the bill as long as they were free on the day we wanted. And so we approached 53two and they came up trumps for us.

53two is a beautiful little venue set in 2 railway arches and is an independent theatre right in the city centre. It’s surrounded by hotels and takeaways and is easy to get to on public transport. It was much more affordable than every single one of the hotel venues we’d looked at and they didn’t want the minimum bar spend up front – we’d have to pay the balance after the event if it wasn’t met (we were always confident that the minimum spend would be met, we’ve been to VO events before, but paying up front – even at 53two – would add thousands onto our costs).

“Fantastic event from the organisation, keeping informed along the way and the event itself. It was so good to chat to fellow VO’s, meeting new people and catching up big style in a atmospheric venue, with a few glasses of wine, great goodie bags and amazingly tasty pies!”

“Catching up with friends old and new in a gorgeous venue with a lovely laid back vibe. And my first gluten-free pie! All here in beautiful Manchester, a city that knows how to make everyone feel warm and welcome. As do Helen and Rob Bee!”

“I can’t thank the team at B Double E enough for organizing the GBVO Social in Manchester this year! Their buddy system, 1-2-1 sessions with sponsors and their soft opening made it possible to get to know people as they arrived and really take the time to chat.”

On top of all that 53two ticks a hell of a lot of boxes with its ethics and values. It is a proudly inclusive venue that supports the arts. Being a theatre they’re very used to the place getting knocked about and set up differently every couple of weeks, the staff are all trained in dealing with disabilities (all BSL trained, and they have noise defenders available behind the bar for those who find loud noises difficult), the building is fully accessible, and it’s dog-friendly.

We were keen that we keep things as ethical and in-house as possible. 53two fit very nicely into that. We hired a magician and a DJ who are also VOs, and the pie company (HM Pasties) work with ex-offenders, giving them a job and helping to prevent reoffending. Plus they’re award winning. Having now eaten them, they are indeed delicious!

Why Have Sponsors?

Albeit we were organising a social, there still needed to be some business value above networking. Our main idea for this was to create an expo area that had more value for both the attendees and sponsors than the expos at many of the conferences we’ve sponsored. So we set about doing our best to attract sponsors who we felt to be a genuine benefit to the VO industry and who could potentially offer one to one appointments and advice for the attendees, covering as wide a variety of aspects of running a voiceover business as we could organise. How successful this would be depended on the size of the venue and how much space we could dedicate to the expo area, and also which companies/suppliers would sign up and be a part of the event. We also wanted to try and coax people who had never sponsored an event before to sponsor us. To these ends we came up with a number of different levels of sponsorship which included a super-cheap option aimed at podcasters/coaches, newer projects and smaller outfits and side-hustles. Of the 17 sponsors we got, 7 had never sponsored an event before – including one of our gold sponsors.

But why do we need sponsors anyway (apart from manning the expo)? All sponsors paid for the exposure they got, and that money enabled us to meet the upfront costs of organising the event, they covered the costs of the free tickets we gave out to local group leaders and they helped keep that low ticket price we were very keen on. It’s no word of a lie that without the sponsors we would have struggled to meet those upfront costs and the event would have made a loss if it had been able to ahead. So thank you to every one of our sponsors – your support went a big way to making the event a success.

Cost Breakdown

All these plans sound very altruistic. But let’s be serious, we’re running a business. This event needed to make some money. Partly because we’re a business and partly because in the year or so that we’ve been running the VO Social we’ve spent a fair bit of money on it – just because it’s free for you guys to attend the local meetups doesn’t mean it’s free for us to run. But we want to be upfront with you guys and explain the costs of running an event such as this and why the ticket was the price it was.

Regular/ongoing VO Social costs:

Event-specific costs:

• Up-front costs (before numbers confirmed) = approx. £5,000
• Cost per person (without sponsors) based on final ticket sales = £117 per person
• Income from sponsors = £5,600
• Ticket sales (before fees) = £4,880
• Income total (before fees) = £10,480
• Event cost = £6,100
• Ongoing annual costs = £1,200
• Costs total = £7,300
• Total profit = £3,180

But this is before you account for any of the time it took to organise and promote.

Our Time

This is a really tough one to calculate, partly because we don’t track every hour of every day.

• On average, we spend 3-6 hours per week on VO Social stuff – things like website updates, creating social posts, local group management etc. (4.5 hours, x48 weeks = 216 hours p/a)
• The newsletter (monthly) takes around 4 hours to put together (4 hours, x 12 months  = 16 hours)
• The VO Social and GBVOS websites each took around 1 week to build, and the branding for both took an additional week – most businesses would need to hire someone to do this, but it only cost us time (2 weeks, x7 hours per day = 70 hours)
• We both spent around 4 full days researching and visiting venues, negotiating prices and agreeing contracts. (4 days x7 hours x2 people = 56 hours)
• Each sales email takes around 1 hour to write, build and schedule (x27 emails = 27 hours)
• Each social post took around 30 minutes to write and design (x45 posts, then add 5 mins per platform to schedule = 24 hours)

That works out at around 319 hours! 😱

Divide our event profit total by 319 hours, that’s us earning £9.90 per hour.

(As of April 1, 2024, the UK’s minimum wage is £11.44 for people aged over 21).

But there is additional time to account for. Things that are much harder to time track like:

• Ideas and planning meetings (yes, we did have them!)
• Sponsors – putting the pack together, pitching them, contracts/invoicing, general communication with our sponsors.
• Ticket name badges and volunteer lanyards – design, printing etc
• Putting the party bags together
• The day itself – we were in the building for 1 hour the day before, then 10:30am to 2am on the day (setup and clear-down)

Time specifically for The Great Big Social was anything from 3 hours to 20 hours per week. A lot of days we were both working on it. The closer the event got, the more days per week it took to organise.

“I really, really love the concept and how the whole event ran and came together. It was affordable for voices, really friendly, welcoming and social.”

“I thought it was a great event and you did an amazing job. I felt a good vibe from the event and it was great to see some of the old skool voices.”

Marketing the Event

We thought it would be interesting for you to see some numbers behind our marketing. Not many people share this side of running events or a business, so here’s what we sent out to promote this event. I have a feeling it’ll be more than you spotted.

Emails

• 27 dedicated emails only about GBVOS (across VO Social newsletter and B Double E newsletter email lists)
• 24 other newsletters emails when we mentioned GBVOS along with other things.

Social posts:

• Approx. 1,260 posts in total – based on 45 unique posts across 28 different channels (VO Social: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook Page, Bluesky & B Double E: Instagram, LinkedIn Page and x2 profiles, Facebook Page, Bluesky, The VO Social Facebook Groups (x16) and our 2 personal Facebook profiles.)
• Approx. 350 Instagram story posts across 2 profiles (frankly, I got sick of counting this one!)
• Mentioned in 9 VO Social Podcast episodes
• Countless mentions at in-person and online events.

Feedback and What We Learned

After the event we sent out questionnaires to attendees and sponsors. This event was the first of (hopefully) many and so we were very keen to know what had and hadn’t worked. We already knew some of these answers from our point of view, but not from the people in the room. The feedback was broadly very positive. There were inevitably some criticisms, some we’d anticipated and some not.

Most of what people were unhappy with were things we also were unhappy with and we already have ideas of how to change. I don’t really want to say too much about the particulars about what will change for next year as surprises are nice and a lot of it will depend on other people and what we can actually get organised. But what I will say is that next year’s event will be pushed into February rather than January, we will be making some changes to how the expo area runs (and possibly renaming it), and now we’ve run one event in the venue we have an idea of how to better use the space. We’ll also keep a keen eye on the ticket price (as we did this time) and we hope to introduce an instalment payment option when buying tickets.

There are other things we want to change and we want to make the event bigger and better. We did get some comments in the feedback forms querying the program for the day and the ticket cost, but hopefully from the above figures you might get an idea of negotiating cost vs content. We promise we’ll do our best to make the event as cost effective as possible, but the more we add to the program the more the ticket price will have to rise.

“Awesome event, fantastic atmosphere everyone was welcoming and happy to chat and I learned loads and connected with some great people. I turned up as a newer VO judging from people I met, but at no point did I feel like I didn’t belong. Would 100% recommend going.”

“Overall GREAT organization, BIG time fun, the SOCIAL place to be! Thank you Helen & Rob for the invitation to attend this amazingly well-created VO day, all your hard work paid off brilliantly! Hoping for repetition!”

Future Plans

The (hopefully!) good news is that there will be another Great Big Voiceover Social (and not just because we’ve paid for the domain for 5 years). Nothing is confirmed or booked yet but we hope 2026 will be in the same venue in early February 2026. We hope you will join us.

The Great Big Voiceover Social Photo Gallery 2025 is here!

To keep in touch with all things Voiceover Social you can find us:

• The Great Big VO Social website
• The VO Social website
• The VO Social Newsletter
• Listen to the VO Social Podcast
• On the socials:
  • Instagram
  • BlueSky
  • Facebook (our page, our main group)
  • LinkedIn Page