The $1,000 Problem
When you run an event, one of the major determining factors of cost is scale.
Let's say you want to run something that only needs (1) a physical space and (2) some tables and chairs - like a writer's workshop or a public meeting for a local org. Each space is finite, and if it has furniture, there's a finite amount of that too. Larger spaces with more furniture typically cost more.
At the small end of the scale, you have events which can run in a living room or a spare room at a public library - say, 10-20 people. These are pretty straightforward to coordinate and, if there's a cost, it can be paid out-of-pocket or via donations - maybe $50-100.
At the large end of the scale, you have events which run in a dedicated venue that require lots of equipment. Maybe 300-1,000 people. These are hard to coordinate, but the scale justifies them having a cost – attendees think of it as a ‘real event' and are open to paying to be there. This means you can start charging for entry and scale your expenses relative to your expected attendance/ticket price. If you're spending $10,000 on the venue and furniture, and 500 people are coming, $20pp will cover those costs.
The tricky place at the moment is the middle ground. A simple event for 50-100 people struggles to meet the psychological bar for paying for a ticket, since for many prospective attendees it won't 'feel worth it', but comes with expenses that are hard to afford without paid entry. For instance, maybe the venue has a hire cost, or it has no furniture and you have to hire it separately. Suddenly you have an $1,000 bill: more than a lot of people can pay out-of-pocket, but are your 50 attendees willing to pay $20 to be in an undecorated room for a basic social event?
This is what I've been calling 'The $1,000 Problem’ - trying to run a modest event at the moment typically costs somewhere in the low thousands, which is a really awkward amount of money to work around.
There are ways to get that much, but they all come with significant complications. Be independently wealthy - well, you are or you aren't. Run a crowdfund - now you have to do a separate event to make the event happen. Seek sponsors - likewise, grant applications take time (both to assemble and to pay out), and finding someone who wants to throw down $1,000 for a bare room can be difficult. Rely on an institutional affiliation - is the event 'theirs' now, and will they add strictures for what the event can be?
Running something as an ‘event series’ can be a way to get around this – packaging a whole set of things into a single batch to seek sponsorship for – but that often requires running the event at cost for a little while to prove it's viable, or lucking out and receiving money for it sight unseen. It also means committing to repetition: this is no longer a one-off event, this is the thing you are doing for [X] period of time.
I don't want to suggest the $1,000 Problem is insurmountable, only that it's something significant an organiser has to overcome to operate anything between the size of ‘a dozen friends in a room’ and ‘a big ticketed occasion’, and that this is why people often struggle to run things in that informal 50-100 person bracket despite the appetite that theoretically exists for it.