Follow up on proposed global sponsorship levels and benefits

I’d like to move forward on this proposal so we can send out the deck to prospective sponsors for 2016. Matt expressed concern to me about the proposal that we offer discounts on sponsorship of WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. and WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event. will result in less money for those events. If you have strong opinions around our dropping this proposed benefit for 2016, please share them in the comments here. If you don’t really care one way or the other, then you can ignore this post. 🙂

#global-sponsors, #multi-event-sponsorship, #wordcamps

Community event sponsorship in 2015

One of the goals I had for the Community team working days after WCSF was to iterate on the Multi-Event Sponsorship program for 2015. Kevin Cristiano, Tina Kesova, and Karim Marucchi met with me for a couple of hours to discuss where we thought the program needed to go for next year, and below are the results.

Great things about the multi-event sponsorship program:

  • When WordCamps get their budgets approved, they know they can count of a certain amount (sometimes a lot) of sponsorship money from multi-event sponsors. Reducing the fundraising burden on organizers allows them to spend more time on making great WordCamps.
  • Larger companies that want to support WordCamps but don’t have the time to spend working with individual organizers can just work with WordCamp CentralWordCamp Central Website for all WordCamp activities globally. https://central.wordcamp.org includes a list of upcoming and past camp with links to each., be billed quarterly, and get an email every time 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. is added to the schedule with useful information about the WordCamp.

Issues with the multi-event sponsorship program:

  • In 2014 many WordCamps (especially in the US) were over-funded before ever recruiting local sponsors. We don’t want to leave out our local sponsors, since WordCamps are local events, but we do want to keep providing WordCamps with a funding “nest egg” at budget approval so that the fundraising burden on organizing teams is eased.
  • WordCamps received lots of financial support in 2014, but more communities are looking at doing more events that are not WordCamps, so we’d like to extend that support to those events, too.
  • Since chapter account meetupsMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. now have their meetup.com dues paid by the Foundation and can now ask to have the Foundation pay for their meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. venue costs, it’s appropriate to extend the sponsorship relationship to include meetups.
  • Some WordCamps did not fulfill the sponsorship packages as consistently as we expected them to.

Moving forward, I think the best course is to facilitate the sponsorship of local communities, not just WordCamps. Therefore, this proposed 2015 Community Sponsorship program addresses sponsorship of all official events.

The other big change in this proposal is that we’ll still be billing sponsors based on (projected) attendance, but we’ll be distributing sponsorship funds to events based on need. I’ll give an example based on WordCamp workflow: when a WordCamp’s budget is being reviewed, the organizing team will be asked how much they think they can raise from local sponsors with about 20 hours of work (including the work needed to acknowledge those sponsors). The budget reviewer will then suggest a sponsorship blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. grant to the WordCamp to help them reach their fundraising goals. This will allow us to give more support to new WordCamps (and other events) that don’t have the established fundraising relationships like other, more established events.

In the discussion we had at the Community Summit about the IRS rules that affect how official events can acknowledge sponsors (due to the non-profit status of the 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.), it was agreed that while those rules were a little complicated, following them was preferable to the unattractive alternatives, and that in fact those rules resulted in a much less commercial “feel,” which we like for our official events. When those discussion notes are published, I’ll come back and edit in a link to them. 🙂

Read on for the proposed 2015 Community Sponsorship program in its novella-level entirety, and reply with a comment if you have a suggestion, doubt, or concern. 🙂 Continue reading

#multi-event-sponsorship, #sponsorship

Sponsorship Squad, Activate!

As you might recall from my call for volunteers to form a WordCamp Sponsorship Squad a few weeks ago, I made a call for volunteers who are experienced 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. organizers and would be interested in helping WordCamp organizers work with fundraising and sponsors. That team has been formed and is made up of:

Kevin Cristiano, WCNYC organizer and one of the co-creators on the Multi-Event Sponsorship Program, yay

Andy Christian, WCNYC

Aditya Kane, WordCamp Mumbai

Valent Mustamin, WordCamp Indonesia

Noel Tock, WordCamp Switzerland

This squad will hold IRC office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time. at two different times on Wednesday: Aditya, Valent, and Noel will be in #wordpress-getinvolved at 4:00 UTC, and Kevin and Andy will be in at 17:00 UTC. Hopefully this will allow organizers from all over the world to check in about doubts or questions they have when fundraising or working with sponsors.

If no one has questions for the squad during office hours, squad members will review WordCamp sites to help organizing teams avoid missing anything in their sponsorship packages, as well as reviewing sponsors for any issues around 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. or trademark that the sponsoring company and organizing team might have missed.

They’ll be recording their reviews and findings on this spreadsheet for now (which I’ll embed into a page when I can figure out how to do that): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiOGe9LzBlkOdGpXclRid1Vmc2Q1eldyU3laTEhBbXc&usp=sharing

Thanks to these volunteers for helping WordCamps keep their/our promises to sponsors and advising organizers on sponsor wrangling! 🙂

#multi-event-sponsorship, #sponsorship, #wordcamp, #wordcamps

Multi Event Sponsorship: Week 2

Last weeks call was a very productive one as we started analysis of the data provided from Andrea on all the WordCamps of 2012.

Quick hits from the initial high level analysis:

  • Need to determine the demarcation point between small and large WordCamps
  • Initial thoughts on geographic regions may not have been detailed enough ( example : USA needs to be broken down into regions, not left as a whole).
  • Received very valuable insight from a  current multi-event sponsor on what they go through in terms of finding event organizers and how they choose events to sponsor

This weeks to do:

  • Detailed analysis of 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. data to help determine sponsorship levels
  • Begin multi-event package structure.

#multi-event-sponsorship

Multi-event Sponsorship Program Update- Week 1

The team gathered for the first time last week to begin discussions on how to put a program together that would facilitate getting companies interested in sponsoring multiple WordCamps in touch with the different organization teams involved in each 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..

We started a list of criteria that needs to be addressed in this program, that sponsors would likely consider when looking at an event for sponsorship. Included in the list were:

  • Geographic regions
    • US and it regions ( for companies who only wish to sponsor US-based WordCamps)
    • Canada and US ( as this is where the majority of WordCamps are held)
    • International( this may require further breakdown into more specific regions, such as Europe, LatAm, SouthAmerica etc… )
  • Size of WordCamp- Number attendees
  • WordCamp budget -  recognizing that it is more expensive to put a WordCamp together in some areas than others

We`ve asked for a pile of data from Andrea to help us put together a single program. Once we have that , we will use it to help determine how the packages can best be shaped to minimize the number of packages available ( and that need to be maintained).

Next meeting is Dec 12

 

#multi-event-sponsorship

The First Round of Subcommittees

OK, so maybe posting the membership of eleven subcommittees in a period of three days was not 100% realistic. I may have been slightly swept away with my excitement – it’s been known to happen. 🙂

I’m going to post three groups today and more in the coming weeks. If you’re added to a group that, in retrospect, you’d rather not take part in, just comment on this post so we can make changes.Once the groups are settled, I’ll ask each group to appoint/elect a notetaker to act as a point of contact and be responsible for posting weekly updates.

The first order of business will be to make a plan, set a project schedule, and assign roles/tasks. Your group might want to meet weekly or a couple times a week to brainstorm or discuss your progress. You can do this via IRC, Skype, Google hangout, or whatever works best for everyone. Once a week, your group will be asked to post an update here on your progress. If a group fails to post two weeks in a row, I’ll reach out and see how I can help the group get back on track.

WordPress.tv event video management

Remkus DeVries
Eric Mann
Jerry Bates
Chandra Maharzan
Phil Erb

Multi-event Sponsorship Program 

(I bumped the membership of this group up to 6 so that we could include a number of representatives from companies who are frequent 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. sponsors.)

Shayda Torabi
Kevin Cristiano
Al Davis
Jared Smith
Marissa Rosen
Garth Koyle

Event planning training materials

Sara Rosso
Andy McIlwain
Luke Gedeon

I’ll email each group so you’ll know how to reach each other. 🙂 Please include your roadmap and assigned roles/tasks as your first weekly update. Each following update should highlight what has happened in the past week — what progress has been made, what challenges have been faced, if there are new or departing contributors — as well as what’s planned for the week ahead.

Here’s a sample weekly subcommittee update (Thanks, Jane!):

MeetupsMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. Galore Subcommittee Update

Past Week:

  • Rolled 4 existing meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. groups onto meetup.com central account: DC, Savannah, Atlanta, and Portland.
  • Sent 6 new meetup starter packs to new meetups: Syracuse, Augusta (GA), Napa, Limerick, Jacksonville, Renton (WA).
  • Arranged for Andrew Nacin to give a talk on APIs via google hangout to 9 meetups simultaneously.
  • Reached out to 10 meetup groups to see if they would join central account.
  • Sent projectors to meetups in Atlanta and Raleigh.

Coming Week:

  • Post video of Nacin’s APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. hangout to wordpress.tv, and ask people to help transcribe it.
  • Keep up with incoming meetup group creation requests.
  • Reach out to 10 more existing groups about joining central account.
  • Reach out to Mika Epstein, Jane Wells, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Daryl Koopersmith and Mark Jaquith about doing a meetup hangout talk in the coming months.
  • Send new meetup starter packs as needed.
  • Send out W buttons and stickers to meetups on central account.

#event-training-materials, #multi-event-sponsorship, #wordpress-tv-event-video-management

Multi-event Sponsorship Program

Description: Create a proposal for multi-event sponsorship program for WordCamps/MeetupsMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook./other events.

There are many large companies (hosting providers, etc) that want to sponsor every 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., every WC above a certain size, WCs with more than x% developer attendees, meetups in developing markets, topic-specific events (theming workshops, hackathons, new user trainings, etc), you name it. Instead of having to reach out to each and every organizer, it would be easier for these companies to just give a blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. payment to the Foundation once a quarter and have it set up automatically. It sounds great, right? Start every event with a block of sponsorship money already in place? You’re right, it would be great!

That said, once you start looking at how to structure deals for this, potential issues become apparent pretty quickly, so it would be best if we structure this in a way that existing organizers can agree on, in terms of the pros and cons. Volunteering for this project would mean talking through the pros and cons in a group, and working on a proposal for how to structure overarching sponsorships so that everyone benefits.

Length of Project: This is a short term “subcommittee” type of project; it would be good to create a proposal within the next 2 weeks so we can get moving on a pilot progam to see how it works. I would expect volunteers to need a time commitment of a few hours a week for about a month to draft a proposal, run it by the group/me/Andrea/Matt, share it with a few potential sponsors for feedback, and turn it into sponsorship documentation for plan.wordcamp.org/meet.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ (coming soon)/codex/etc.

Experience Required: Experience *managing the finances* of a sanctioned WP event (especially within the past year running finances through Foundation), ormanaging your company or employer’s financial sponsorship of events (of sanctioned WP events is great, but not required).

#multi-event-sponsorship