[Debconf-team] Note about sponsorship deadlines.

[Brian Gupta <brian.gupta@brandorr.com>]

I just heard from one potential sponsor that they would have loved to
sponsor DC14, but that they finalized their 2014 sponsorships in Nov
of 2013.

I am mentioning this so that the DC15 bid team can learn from this and
figure out who will be working on sponsorship early, and have them
join debconf-sponsors-team. (The majority of fundraising is, from my
limited observation, done by bid team members, as there isn't a large
amount of year over year active members of sponsors-team, since people
tend to take breaks after investing a lot of time in fundraising for
any particular conference.)

I'm thinking that going forward we need to schedule to have our
biggest fundraising push in Sept-Nov of the year prior, and that
winning bid teams must be made aware that they need to identify enough
team members, prior to this window, to get them up to speed and make
this happen. (Time to start thinking now.)

I'll also add that looking back at DC13 fundraising efforts, it was as
successful as it was, because there were a large % of their local team
working on it, starting in the prior year.

Thanks,
Brian

P.S. - I see this, and I think many people who have been around knew
this, but going forward, we really need to make sure to all make sure
new bid teams are made aware that they will need to be doing the
majority of the fundraising work, as at least half of funding has come
from local/regional sources.