You might think you should just do sponsorships the same as way as for WordCamps, and that’s not a good idea! Find out more about our unique sponsorship situation here!
do_actiondo_action do_action hackathons are community-organised events that are focussed on using WordPress to give deserving charitable organisations their own online presence. Learn more on doaction.org. events differ to WordCamps regarding sponsorship as they are run directly under the non-profit WordPress FoundationWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org.. As such, sponsorship benefits are different from what you might find at a 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..
There are two forms of sponsorship for do_action events – financial and web services. First, we’ll look at what each of these forms of sponsorship involve and then we’ll look at what benefits individual sponsors will receive.
The sponsorship package listed below is the complete and only sponsorship packaged that you can offer to sponsor of do_action events. You may not add anything to it.
Financial sponsorship
Financial sponsorship is fairly straightforward – a company contributes money towards a portion of the event. The amount of money given will depend on the needs of your event. Seeing as though do_action event budgets are relatively small (in comparison to WordCamps), having different sponsorship levels isn’t always practical, so it often makes more sense to either have a single sponsorship level or offer sponsors the option of contributing any amount they like above a specified minimum.
Web service sponsorship
“Web services” includes any online service from hosting, to online services and product licences. In do_action terms this usually means hosting and premium pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party/theme licences. Due to the nature of do_action events and the fact that they are designed to provide a free online presence for all of the non-profits involved, all web service sponsorships need to last for the full life of the site.
In practice, this means that hosting accounts, plugin/theme licences, and any other sponsored online service, need to be unlimited in terms of length, so that they will remain free for as long as the site is live. The only caveat here is that in some cases hosts are unable to cover the cost of the annual domain registration (due to local regulations) – in that case, this would be the only cost incurred by the non-profit directly.
In addition to the above, all plugins and themes used at do_action events (whether sponsored or not) must use the GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples. licence. If you need to confirm whether a plugin or theme is GPL licenced, you can use this handy GPL vetting checklist.
Sponsorship package
With all that in mind, here is the complete sponsorship package that you can offer to all sponsors regardless of the type or amount of their sponsorship.
You may not add additional items to this sponsorship package – this is the complete list of what you can offer to do_action sponsors.
- Company logo on the site
- Company description on the site (as long as it does not contain qualitative or comparative descriptions of their products, services, facility or company)
- Link to company website from the site
- Logo on a slide projected during the event
- Tweet(s) and/or posts to Facebook (etc.) thanking the sponsor
- Thanks in pre- and/or post-event emails
- Thank you in opening or closing remarks
The reason that this may seem rather restrictive in terms of what you can offer to sponsors is due to the non-profit status of the WordPress Foundation. You can find out more detailed info about that here.
To reiterate, you may not add any additional items to this package or offer anything else to your sponsors.
Some examples of things that you cannot offer to sponsors are:
- Banners at the event
- Booth/table at the event
- Option to distribute swag at the event
- Company logo printed on any distributed items
If there is anything that you would like to offer to your sponsors that we have not mentioned here and you feel might be acceptable, please email support@wordcamp.org to ask about it before making any promises.
