Sponsorhip Levels in EUR (was: Finishing the sponsorship brochure)
On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 05:42:05PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org> [2014-08-15 13:45 +0200]:
> > Well, there's a difference between presentable, and agreed-upon-content.
> > I don't mind fixing up the layout or anything this weekend, but we can't
> > just hand out different version of the brochure with widely varying
> > sponsorship perks or EUR levels.
>
> No, but if your only concern are the levels, then we can go with
> your latest version. I think we can increase them a bit, but I agree
> that we cannot change them once they are out (except increasing
> might even work).
If we change the DC13 levels from CHF to EUR, it's a 20% increase over
DC13. If we change the DC14 levels from USD to EUR, it's a 35% increase
over DC14 (today's conversion rate).
Personally, I don't think that's very sensible, but nobody explained so
far why a 35% increase over DC14 is ok and/or why we should ramp it up
another 5-25% (to almost 70%(!)[1] higher than DC14, at least for silver
level), as Martin suggested.
DC14 has an unusual amount of gold/platinum sponsors, most of them big
US companies. Apart from SAP (and I doubt they'd sponsor, but who
knows), there are no similar german companies available, I think
all/most prospective companies are either german subsidies of US
companies or SMEs. So what we have to ask ourselves is: do we want
those as silver or gold sponsors, and if the latter, what do we think
they can afford? It is clear that this will be a one-off event for them
(DC15 being in their home turf), but on the other hand, their
sponsorship budget is likely dwarved by the budgets of Google, Intel,
IBM etc.
The other point is the demise of large government sponsors. DC13 had a
gold regional government-related sponsor, DC14 does not have any
regional government-related sponsors I believe. Do we think we will get
any? Contratry to this, DC9 in Caceres and DC11 in Banja Luka had quite
similar levels to nowadays, but (i) back then, bronze level sufficed to
get on the t-shirt, something I think a lot of sponsors are after and
(ii) they didn't care as much about fundraising as they had large
government backing.
In summary, I think we should think much harder about what kind of
sponsors we think we want/can attract, and what they would be willing to
contribute/what they expect in return. We should have done this months
ago, and we didn't, but just skiping over this step doesn't help either
I think.
Michael
[1] Google today says "6000 USD in EUR" are 4478.05 EUR, so the proposed
7500 EUR for silver are a 67% increase if my maths are correct
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