[Ambassadors] calling for backup

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 02:27:27PM -0400, Chris Tyler wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-03-29 at 09:57 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote: 
> > > [0] and if there was a portion of the bill someone else wanted to pick 
> > > up - for instance, I recall OLPC sponsored... I think it was FUDPub, 
> > > back in the January 2009 FUDCon in Boston - there's no "internal Red 
> > > Hat" stuff needed at all.
> > 
> > We should continue to look for sponsorship opportunities for FUDCon
> > where we can do similar partnerships.  Those sponsorships increase
> > when FUDCon results in some tangible gain, be it code or otherwise,
> > that's of interest to a sponsor.  If the planning group for a FUDCon
> > event builds an objective for something deliverable like that, the
> > potential's much greater for substantial sponsorship.
> 
> I wonder if the community doesn't really see much of a difference
> between sponsored and non-sponsored -- for example, all of the recent
> FUDCons have had FUDPubs, so there's little visible difference if the
> FUDPub is sponsored by another party or not (it doesn't "alter the
> experience" from an attendee point of view). If the FUDPub is sponsored,
> then obviously Fedora is able to do other things such as sponsor more
> people to travel to FUDCon or to old additional FADs, but these are not
> highly visible or obvious consequences of the sponsorship.
> 
> I wonder if sponsorship would be more successful -- that is, more
> attractive to sponsors -- if it had a more-visible impact on the event?

In the past, we've offered sponsors the ability to have a planned
presentation at the FUDCon event as well.  That's more visible than
FUDPub, since we often don't have a lot of opportunities available for
flashy "Have a good time, this event is sponsored by ___" messages,
since we don't usually control the venues to that extent.  We've done
co-branded swag too, such as T-shirts, which is sort of a continuing
ad for the sponsor.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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