Proposed experiment: allow WordCamp attendees to opt-in to a mailing list to be shared with sponsors

We’re always looking for ways to facilitate our sponsors finding value in supporting WordPress community events, and as 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. program continues to grow, it’s helpful to explore new ways to acknowledge/benefit sponsors.

I’d like to propose we try out offering a new sponsor benefit at a few WordCamps, over the next 4-6 months: including an opt-in box at registration for attendees who want to share their email address with sponsors so that the attendee can receive special deals and discounts from sponsors.

This would be a completely opt-in feature. Common wisdom says that most of our attendees will not opt-in, but I suspect that we might be wrong about that, and I’d love to have some empirical data on this. The wording would need to be carefully phrased, but a first draft might be:

“Would you like us to share your email address with our top-level sponsors, so they can send you special deals or coupon codes? (yes/no checkbox)” Here’s an example:

This idea came up when I was discussing sponsor benefits with the WordCamp Europe team, in my capacity as their 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.. Rather than just trying this out with one event, however, I’d like to propose that we recruit 3-5 WordCamps to run this experiment. Trying out offering this benefit in a variety of WordCamps, with different attendee size and locations, would give us better data to use to decide if we want to add this to the list of standard sponsor benefits that WordCamps typically choose from when they’re building their sponsor packages.

All WordCamp organizing teams that wanted to take part in this experiment would need to commit to following a similar practice, so there’s not too much variation in the implementation:

  1. Use standard wording, translated to local language(s) as appropriate
  2. Limit the benefit to limited level(s) of sponsorship (I think just top-level)
  3. Share email addresses to top-level sponsors at an agreed-upon time-before-WordCamp
  4. Report back to the global community teamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps. on this P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. after their WordCamp is over

I propose we run the experiment between now and June 2018, and if the results are positive, then we can add this as one of the benefits that any local WordCamp team can include in a sponsorship package.

If you have feedback, concerns, questions, and suggestions about this idea, please share them in a comment on this post! If you’re on an organizing team that would like to take part in this experiment, please also comment here! 🙂

#experiment, #sponsorship