Let's talk about the 2017 Global Sponsorship Program

Welcome!

This is the home of the Make Community team for the WordPress open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project!

Here is where we have policy debates, project announcements, and assist community members in organizing events.

Everyone is welcome to comment on posts and participate in the discussions regardless of skill level or experience.

Get Involved

If you love WordPress and want to help us do these things, join in!

Find upcoming WordPress events

Find your local Meetup

Organize:

Let’s Talk

Team Meetings are held the first Thursday of every month at 12:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC on Slack in
#community-team (same agenda).

Learn More

Learn more about the work we do from:

It’s time (past time!) to start drafting a Global Sponsorship program for 2017, yay! This week I sent a survey to current global sponsors to find out what they love and what they don’t love from the 2016 program. Apart from sponsor feedback, though, it’s worth discussing what, if anything, we think isn’t working in the 2016 program, including benefits, levels, and to some extent, execution.

As a reminder, we don’t have unlimited time to work on this, since we want to get a 2017 program to our current and prospective sponsors this month. I’m not aware of anything in our benefits packages that is specifically not working, but people don’t always tell me things directly, so. Here is your chance to tell us directly: what do you as event organizers love about the global sponsorship program? And what do you not love so much? 🙂

#global-sponsorship

David Bisset 4:18 pm on October 13, 2016

I think overall the program works for me, as an event organizer.

I could use a reminder for contacts (email) for each of these global sponsors though. First thing I do when WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Miami is approved is send an email and make personal contact, and not wait until the event gets close or wait for them to reach out to me. 🙂
- Andrea Middleton 4:34 pm on October 13, 2016
  
  We send a “meet your global sponsors!” email to the lead organizer and sponsor wranglerWrangler Someone, usually a person part of event organizing team, who looks after certain things like budget or sponsors. when the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. is added to the schedule; do you think that scheduling another email for a month or two before the event as a reminder (“Make sure you reach out to your global sponsors!” or similar) would be good too? I don’t want to send too many emails, but if another auto-email would help, well, we have the technology. 🙂
  
  (Also thanks for helping spread the word and for your feedback!) <3
  - David Bisset 7:23 pm on October 13, 2016
    
    Forgot about that email! I would think it’s up to the organizers to follow up and if they don’t get a response, then pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” the Foundation.
    
    Even with this email, it seems from my talks w/ organizers (both whom i mentorEvent Supporter Event Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues. and do not) that reaching out to sponsors isn’t as common as it should be. Personally a reminder email doesn’t bother me since i already am dealing with many, many emails anyways. 🙂
  - Larry Swanson 10:08 pm on October 21, 2016
    
    I had a similar issue when I came on board as sponsor wranglerWrangler Someone, usually a person part of event organizing team, who looks after certain things like budget or sponsors. for WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Seattle. It took me a while to ferret out the names and contact info from that email you had sent earlier. Wondering if there’s an onboarding document anywhere for folks new to the role about where that kind of info is – apologies if there is and I’ve missed it.
Jessica Estes 4:50 pm on October 13, 2016

For us, as a first-time WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. (OKC) it was a bit confusing/discouraging to not hear back from the global sponsors when we emailed them a thank you/notification of the event and asked if they would be using their tickets, sending swag, or needing a table.

We had plenty of space for any who wanted to have a table and several of the global sponsors didn’t reply at all. If the Handbook had told us that it was normal to not hear back it would have relieved some stress that comes with being new organizers.

We just didn’t know what to expect, but had attended WordCamps that had several sponsors present so kind of had that expectation and didn’t quite know what to think about silence back from them. We understood that they’d really already made a significant contribution with their funds and likely already had travel plans made prior to notification of our event, but having some instruction to organizers would have been helpful.
- David Bisset 7:25 pm on October 13, 2016
  
  In the past, i’ve had troubles reaching out to a few sponsors early. I would like maybe a “recommended date to get information to us” to us (X weeks or days prior to the conference). Some sponsors like waiting until the last minute to say “we are sending down all our stuff, can you pick it up and take it to the venue” or just “we are coming, can confirm tickets” and by then you already have t-shirt, food, and other numbers… sure, you pad things to cover them, that’s not a problem but would be nice to cover things for smaller camps. Just my $0.02.
- Andrea Middleton 9:00 pm on October 13, 2016
  
  We could probably improve our communication with organizers around what to expect from global community sponsors. A lot of global sponsors participate in the global program because they’re short on staff (so they can’t correspond with individual camps very often) but still want to support all the WordCamps they can. So yeah, I can see where setting expectations for organizers would be a good idea. 🙂 Thanks Jessica!

Welcome!

Get Involved

Let’s Talk

Learn More

Share this: