When institutions budget for a conference, a fellowship, or a competition, they account for the obvious costs.
Venue. Catering. Speaker travel. Publication fees. Marketing. Maybe a small honorarium for external reviewers.
What almost never appears in the budget is the cost of coordination itself.
Not because it does not cost anything. Because it is paid in a currency that does not show up on a spreadsheet — the working hours of the people who hold the whole thing together.
This post is an attempt to make that cost visible. Not to make anyone feel bad about how programs have been run. But because invisible costs do not get solved. They just get absorbed, year after year, by the people least able to push back on them.
The Coordination Stack Most Institutions Are Running
Before counting the cost, it helps to name the work.
A typical academic conference, competition, or fellowship cycle involves roughly the following coordination tasks — and this is a conservative list:
Before submissions open: Setting up the call for papers or applications. Building the submission form. Writing and sending the announcement. Managing the mailing list. Answering early enquiries about eligibility, format, and deadlines.
During the submission window: Receiving submissions by email or form. Logging each one into a master spreadsheet. Sending acknowledgement emails individually or in batches. Handling incomplete submissions — chasing missing files, wrong formats, unpaid fees. Answering the same questions repeatedly from different applicants.
Review and evaluation: Identifying and contacting reviewers. Waiting for confirmations. Assigning papers or applications to reviewers manually. Distributing materials — emailing PDFs or sharing Drive folders. Tracking who has started, who has submitted, who has gone quiet. Chasing. Chasing again. Collecting scores and consolidating them into a master evaluation sheet. Resolving conflicts where reviewer scores diverge significantly.
Decisions and communications: Compiling final decisions. Drafting and sending acceptance and rejection communications — individually, or with mail merge if the coordinator knows how. Managing responses, appeals, and queries. Confirming attendance or participation.
Logistics: Sending schedule information. Coordinating presenter slots. Managing last-minute withdrawals and substitutions. Communicating venue or platform details. Answering logistical questions that should have been in the original email but weren't.
Close: Collecting final versions of papers or deliverables. Processing any outstanding payments. Building the program report for institutional records. Filing everything somewhere it can be found again.
Every item on that list is a human task. Every human task takes time. And in most institutions, that time belongs to someone who already has another job.
The Real Unit of Cost: Coordinator Hours
The honest unit of cost for running a program is not the venue booking or the printing budget.
It is the number of hours a coordinator — or more often, a team of coordinators — spends doing the work described above.
Based on what institutions tell us when they move to a dedicated platform, a mid-sized academic conference with 50 to 150 submissions typically consumes somewhere between 80 and 150 hours of coordinator time across the full program lifecycle.
That is two to four working weeks. Spread across a team of people who are simultaneously teaching, advising students, managing other administrative responsibilities, and trying to do the work that is actually in their job description.
The cost does not appear as a line item. It appears as:
A faculty member who did not finish their research paper that semester because they spent three weeks coordinating a conference.
A department administrator who answered 200 emails about submission formatting instead of supporting the department.
A postgraduate student pressed into service as an unofficial coordinator because there was no one else.
A program that was quietly dropped from the calendar because the previous year was too exhausting to repeat.
These are real costs. They are just not the kind that get reviewed in a budget meeting.
What Happens When the Program Grows
The insidious thing about manual coordination is how it scales.
Double the submissions and you roughly double the coordination work. More acknowledgements to send. More reviewers to assign and chase. More communications to manage. More entries in the master spreadsheet. More opportunities for something to fall through the gap.
This means that program growth — which is supposed to be a good thing — becomes a threat to the people running it. The coordinator who managed 50 submissions last year is now managing 120 and wondering how.
The answer is usually more people. Which means more coordination overhead just to coordinate the coordinators. More things to brief, more things to check, more versions of the spreadsheet to reconcile.
The program grows. The team grows. The cost grows. But because the cost is still measured in hours rather than invoices, nobody is asking whether there is a better way.
The Software Gap That Creates This Problem
The reason academic program coordination is so labour-intensive is not that the work is inherently complex. Most of it is straightforward, repetitive, and rule-based — exactly the kind of work that software is designed to handle.
The reason is that the software institutions already have was not built for this.
Student management systems manage students. Finance systems manage money. Email manages communication. None of them manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a time-bound program with an intake, a review process, and a documented outcome.
So the coordinator fills the gap. They become the integration layer between the form that received the submission, the spreadsheet that tracked it, the email that assigned it, the Drive folder that distributed it, and the inbox that collected the result.
Every handoff between tools is a manual step. Every manual step is an opportunity for error, delay, or something falling through the gap.
The cost of that gap is the coordinator's time. And it compounds across every program the institution runs every year.
What Dedicated Infrastructure Changes
When the entire program lifecycle runs in one place — intake, payments, reviewer assignment, evaluation, communications, audit trail — the coordinator's job changes fundamentally.
The repetitive, rule-based work — sending acknowledgements, assigning reviewers, tracking completion, sending decisions — is handled by the platform. The coordinator sets up the rules once and the system follows them.
What is left for the coordinator is the work that actually requires human judgment. Handling an unusual submission. Resolving a genuine conflict. Making a call on an edge case. These things still need a person. But they are a small fraction of the total workload.
At Bharath College of Science and Management in Thanjavur, this shift reduced the coordination team for their international conference BICET from six to ten people down to two — with approximately 120 hours of coordinator time recovered per program.
That is not a marginal improvement. It is a fundamental change in what it costs to run a program well.
The Programs This Applies To
The coordination cost described in this post is not unique to conferences. It applies to every time-bound institutional program with an intake process and a review workflow.
Competitions and hackathons. Fellowship and grant cycles. Scholarship rounds. Accelerator cohorts. Award programs. Internal research grants.
Every program type has the same underlying structure — open call, submissions, evaluation, decisions, communications, close — and the same underlying cost when that structure is managed manually.
The question is not whether the cost exists. It exists at every institution running any of these programs.
The question is whether it stays invisible.
Making the Cost Visible
The first step toward solving this problem is the same as the first step toward solving any problem that has been normalised: naming it clearly.
Your institution's conferences and programs are not free to run. They cost coordinator hours — real hours, from real people, at real cost to their other responsibilities and to the institution's broader capacity.
Those hours are recoverable. Not by running fewer programs. Not by asking coordinators to work faster. By replacing the manual coordination stack with infrastructure that was built for the job.
The budget meeting that never had a line item for coordination cost might need one. Not to spend more money. To understand where the existing cost is going — and whether it could be going somewhere better.
JustPitch is live with institutions across India and expanding internationally. If your institution is planning a conference, fellowship, competition, or scholarship round, request a demo at justpitch.in.