[CREATE] LGM 2010: sponsoring

[Dave Neary]

Hi Femke,

Femke Snelting wrote:
> Before getting drawn into the LGM programme, I would like to ask on a 
> practical note for your experience in financing the event ...

My rule has always been set a target, fundraise until you meet it, and
then stop - there's lots of important stuff to do. For the first LGM, we
raised €20,000.

> How can we start getting sponsors to fly/train people to Brussels? It's 
> not the kind of thing we are used to so we need your help :-)
> Who is interested in acquisition, looking for finances, sponsors?

You need to sell the event.

There are three possible ways to position the conference:
 - You will be able to sell product here
 - This will generate goodwill for your brand among an important
constituency
 - This is just a good thing to support

The first two are self-interested, and to be honest, it's really hard to
convince anyone of the first one - there just aren't enough people
attending for it to be true (and if you try, then people will start
asking for stands & presentations which are little more than sales
pitches, and you don't really want either).

The third will be a hard sell in this economy.

So primarily aim for the second. Also, a small bit of the third won't do
any harm.

To position yourself as something important enough to generate goodwill,
a press book is great - photocopies of articles about past editions,
maybe a copy of the booklet we got made for the second edition, any
information which makes it look like the conference got attention -
especially anything which mentions the sponsors :}

To help with the "this is a good thing to support" angle, results help.
Examples of work which originated in Lyon or Montreal and is now in the
hands of users, projects which have succeeded in breaking through
because of exposure at an LGM, etc. Think wide here, anything which can
realistically be ascribed to an LGM is game. Some examples I've used in
the past are color management in the Linux graphics stack, much of the
work for which happened after Marti Maria's presentation in Lyon, the
agreed formats, mime types and directories for graphics resources like
brushes, clip-art, patterns and so on, the improvement in
inter-application drag-and-drop and cut-and-paste - there are doubtless
other examples from later LGMs. Those involved know that most of the
work on these was done before or after the conference, but clearly the
meetings which happened at LGM gave an impetis to each of these initiatives.

Another angle which mighth work for a small number of potential sponsors
is related to this - "you'll have a better product because of the
conference". This argument would be particularly good for Linux
distributions or resellers of binaries of the various applications, but
again, you need to remember that money is tight these days.

> We entered an application for subsidy a few weeks ago at the Flemish 
> Community (governmental subsidy for design events), asking for support 
> in the travel costs. Although the committee seems intrigued we're not 
> sure 'open source' and 'developers meeting' fit their average culture 
> criteria. So I'm just mentioning this, but there's a small chance it 
> will make it and we will only know the score in a few months.
> 
> Pledgie anyone?

Pledgie is a lot of work to stir up enough of a storm to get popular
support - two years ago I was even criticised for "spamming" planets and
mailing lists with reminders about the campaign, and we only barely
scratches the surface of the kind of support I hoped for and know
exists. It certainly doesn't fit the "Field of Dreams" business model.

Some suggestions for more traditional bodies or individuals you should
contact about support, who may well be interested in funding you (I'd be
happy to do introductions for most of these):

General benefactors:
* Stichtige NLnet
* Mark Shuttleworth (no harm in trying again, and with Ubuntu Studio,
there might even be a business case to be made for Canonical)
* Acquia maybe?

Commercial Linux multimedia companies (free software)
* Fluendo (if we can broaden the reach of the conference to include
video streaming)
* Collabora (video editing)
* Canonical (see above)
* Novell (they have some interest in multimedia)
* KO GmbH (developers of OpenOffice, including Krita)

Hardware:
* Intel (graphics chips & more)
* HP (printers & cameras)

(I don't have any good contacts for the following)
* Graphics chips: Nvidia, AMD
* Tablets: Wacom
* Cameraos: Canon, Fuji, etc
* Printers: Epson, etc

Major graphics software users:
Hollywood studion (not a chance, but worth a one-off "hi please help
out" email if we have a brochure)

I'm sure there are other ideas that you could use.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
dneary at free.fr
Tel: +33 9 51 13 46 45
Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13