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

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

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?

How about something more like this:

$3000 <= 10 employees or $1M revenues
$10000 <= 50 employees or $5M revenues
$20000 > 50 employees or $5M revenues

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).

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?


> > 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.

Cheers,
Dave.
--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org