Re: Premium sponsor ship offerings [WAS Re: recruiting sponsors]

["Jaap A. Haitsma" <jaap haitsma org>]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 11:43, Dave Neary<dneary gnome org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Jaap A. Haitsma wrote:
> > Many people liked this option when we discussed it compared to the old
> > system
> > 5000$ < 50
> > 10000$ > 50
> >
> > If you think 5 are too many I'd go for 3
> > 1000$ < 10 employees
> > 5000$ < 100 employees
> > 20000$ > 1000 employees
>
> No members between 100 and 1000 employees?

Oops my mistake. I just stroke out two of the five options

> How about something more like this:
>
> $3000 <= 10 employees or $1M revenues
> $10000 <= 50 employees or $5M revenues
> $20000 > 50 employees or $5M revenues

Many private companies don't want to disclose their revenues so I'd
leave that out. Furthermore in this case if you are 11 people you
already pay 10K, which is a lot for such a small company. Looking at
it it's not really easy to fit a fair system three scales. 4 seems to
be the minimum, and it's also obvious in a way companies of 10, 100,
1000 or more than 1000 are very different companies.

$1000 <= 10 employees
$5000 <= 100 employees
$10000 <= 1000 employees
$20000 > 1000 employees


> I'm in favour of increasing dues for existing advisory board members, with
> their agreement of course.
>
> > My idea for a premium fee was to help smaller companies. If you say a
> > premium package costs 30K it will be to expensive for small companies.
> > For a company with less than 10 people paying 1000$ a year (in my
> > proposal) paying an extra fee of say 10K$ might be worth it, when
> > there are perks like travel vouchers etc.
>
> Again, I want to point out that there are 2 distinct issues here: advisory
> board membership (where the fee is important, but the strategic alignment
> with GNOME is more important) and sponsorship (where strategic alignment is
> unimportant, and we'll take your money whoever you are).

We are in agreement here.

> The simple principle to follow for sponsorship is: if you pay more, you get
> more. The size of the company shouldn't even enter into consideration, it's
> the size of your contribution which matters.
>
> There is a certain charm in saying that a small guy who makes a
> proportionately larger donation should get more than a big guy making the
> same donation, but at the end of the day a $50,000 from Google is worth more
> to the GNOME Foundation than a $1000 donation from me, even though $1000 is
> probably comparatively more money to me. So why shouldn't Google get more
> thanks for giving more?

I think the current thinking is to make the premium package something
that has a fixed fee. So we are in agreement here.

For the normal sponsorship I would be opposed to only have size of the
contribution matter. Many small shops are really important for the
further development of GNOME and relatively contribute a lot of code
to GNOME compared to large multinationals.

> > > The reason I thought of this is because someone needed a premium
> > > sponsorship
> > > to include GUADEC. Again, it's about getting approval and it's easier to
> > > get
> > > approval once internally for one thing than to have to go back for all
> > > the
> > > line items.
> > >
> > > We'll have to see in the report, but I think most companies gave the same
> > > amount they would have given if it was just GUADEC - I'm not sure we made
> > > twice as much by combining the conferences. Not to say there aren't other
> > > benefits ...
> >
> > Which report are you talking about?
>
> The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit financial report, presumably.
>
>
> > Looks like a decent package to me. (Stormy I think you beat all of us
> > in the brainstorm :-) )
> >
> > Comments? I think we should work it out further now to a concrete
> > proposal with the right numbers
>
> I do like the idea of a sponsorship package, but I can't insist enough that
> it be completely separate from the advisory board, and be associated with
> the level of donation rather than size of the donor. The package (except for
> the advisory board seat) looks great. You would just need to chop it up in
> appropriate chunks to reflect contribution levels.

Maybe we should take of the "advisory board seat upon approval" from the perks.

Stormy,

Can you out of the discussion make a conclusion which you also support
and we can start formalizing with the existing sponsors as the new
corporate fees and premium sponsorship

Thanks

Jaap