How to Be A Barcamp Seattle Sponsor
Philosophy and Guidelines
Over the first couple of years of BarCamp, at more than 100 events, a number of best practice guidelines evolved from within the community with regard to sponsors and the support they provide. BarCampSeattle tries to follow the BarCamp guidlines making slight modifications necessary so as to make things work at BarCampSeattle.
- Sponsor participation: We try to focus on (local) sponsors who can actually attend and participate in some way.
- Limits: We try to limit cash contributions. In kinnd donations are much better (see below).
- Diversity: We prefer to have many small sponsors rather than few big ones.
- We encourage in-kind donations: We request that sponsors order food and other food stuff directly, minimizing the organizer's duties and responsibilities as well as the amount of money we have to touch.
- Chunking: We chunk sponsorships. We break our budget items into manageable chunks that companies can "adopt". For example, we will let one company pay for the lunch, and another for shirts, etc. Chunking is nice because it means the companies can write checks directly to the vendors, and we never have to touch any cash. This limits our personal liability and should make companies feel safer.
- Transparency: We list all incoming donations (cash and in-kind) as well as all outgoing costs on our wiki.
To sponsor take a look at what is open on the current year's sponsorship page and then contact one of the organizers found on that page.
