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

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

I will work at dividing all the benefits into different levels of sponsorship on a wiki page when I get back from vacation. (I will be back on the 24th.) 

I'll try to have it on the wiki by GUADEC so we can point people at it and get feedback and have conversations in person with existing or potential sponsors.

Stormy

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 4:09 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

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