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

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Jaap A. Haitsma wrote:
> So you are proposing that people in the advisory board should pay more
> that people that are just sponsors?

I am proposing that we in no way create any appearance of a link between 
sponsoring the GNOME Foundation and being on the advisory board. They're 
not the same thing.

People on the advisory board are paying to ensure the GNOME Foundation 
continues to exist because of the value we create for them, and this 
value is considerable. And so the amount they pay should be considerable.

Peoiple sponsoring GNOME are doing so essentially out of a desire to 
help out and "give back". And so it seems natural that they will give 
less for a similar sized company.


> > You need an "enterprise version", a "home version" and a "student version"
> > of GNOME sponsorship, but the key is that they can't be the same thing, or
> > the big guys won't give.
>
> What according to you should be the concrete proposal besides the
> sponsorship proposal you gave

I think the list of potential benefits was great - in particular, if we 
get the take-up, formalising a GNOME Users Summit which includes big 
GNOME users invited to attend (ideally, involving the sales & marketing 
people in IBM, Novell, Canonical, Red Hat, etc, to get some of their big 
clients in attendance) sounds like a great benefit - although a big job 
to organise. "Yearly meeting at GUADEC" sounds unrealistic and not 
necessarily desirable to me - at GUADEC we have hackers and the advisory 
board meeting, a user group meeting could be smaller, more intimate, and 
perhaps a little more up-market.

The lower-cost, lower-effort benefits like access to the executive 
director, monthly conference calls on product plans, sponsorship 
presence on the web site and in annual (or quarterly?) reports should be 
basic to every package, scaling logo prominence according to donation level.

I don't like selling presentations for GUADEC, it's something I've been 
vocal against in the past.

Like I said, the brainstormed ideas are mostly great, and just need to 
be packaged to have 3 levels, with the levels set right.

For corporate donor packages, I like $2000/$5000/$10000 as the levels, 
but you should bear in mind the cost of each level - organising a user 
summit will cost a lot of money, and it'll be tough to get it sponsored.

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