About this page
The purpose of this page is to document how sponsorship issues are being addressed across the Barcamp community worldwide. It is intended to be a living, breathing guideline for all you *camp organizers out there.
As of 2007/10/10, this is still very much a work in progress. As much as possible, the initial content was pulled out of the mailing list as well as various blog posts on the topic.
As always, please add your thoughts and help fill in the gaps. Thank you!
Best practices
Coming out of the original BarCamp, a number of guidelines have been established with regard to sponsors and the support they provide.
- Sponsor participation: Try to focus on (local) sponsors who can actually attend and participate in some way. (Source)
- Limits: Limit cash contributions
- Used to be $250, recently was $300 at BarCampBlock, but has occasionally been higher elsewhere
- This is great because it means that no one "owns" BarCamp, and we get to keep the great community vibe. (Source)
- Another reason this is a good idea: The little guys (startups, individuals) can contribute on a level playing field with the big guys (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.)
- Diversity: Many small sponsors are better than a few big ones.
- Encourage in-kind donations: Request that sponsors order food and other food stuff directly, minimizing the organizer's duties and responsibilities as well as the amount of money they touch. (Source)
- Chunking: Chunk (or microchunk) your sponsorships. Break your budget items into manageable chunks that companies can "adopt". For example, 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 you never have to touch any cash. This limits your personal liability and makes companies feel safer. (Example: BarCampRDU, Source)
- Don’t get anyone’s company books involved. Too messy. Either deal in all cash or get a special paypal account. At the end of the day, you don’t want to be holding extra money. Best to get people to sponsor things like chair rentals, a meal, etc, and never touch the money yourself. (Source)
- Transparency: List all incoming donations (cash and in-kind) as well as all outgoing costs on the wiki.
Variations
Other ideas folks have come up with locally:
- Provide various sponsorship levels, or tiered sponsoring (Example: BarCampLA-4, Source)
- Put sponsor logos on the t-shirts (Example: BarCampDallas, Source
- Charge a small sign-up fee (e.g. using Eventbrite). Sometimes $15 will ensure that people come after signing up. (Source)
Case studies, success stories etc.
Share your experiences here. What worked? What didn't? What modifications did you have to make in order to get your *camp off the ground?
Various camps (Germany, China)
Via Franz (Source):
- The amount of donation was free
- All sponsors, big or small were treated the same
- The sponsors had no right to influence the event
- There was no minimum, but the average was between 500€ - 1000€
- We never touched money, like Crystal proposed it in her "Ten steps to organizing a BarCamp". All bills were paid directly from a sponsor to caterers, t-shirt printers, any rentals. None of our own company books were ever involved.
- Hard to find sponsors in the beginning, but some companies guarantueed us a certain amount, which we reduced with the donations of other sponsors. That worked very well. It gave us the neccessary finacial security to order shirts, food and what else is needed for a BarCamp.
- Most of the sponsors, big or small, were participating with very interesting sessions, none of them ever tried to make it a sales show for their products and/or services.
- Reasons why we didn't make it public to everyone are:
- Most companies do not want that the amount of their donations are made public.
- We have been attacked by German bloggers for being sponsored by companies that are blamed for making business in China. Not more than allegations and unverified (the same companies sponsored in the USA
btw.) But these bloggers are loud and have a wide reach. They publish incorrect details and they play the racist/human rights card. It is impossible to debate with them. I tried and it resulted in deletion of my comments.
- In Germany no one talks about money/income etc. It is a cultural taboo.
- The amount of the donations are communicated to anybody at the event, we just haven't made them public on a website.
