Paul:
Thanks for bringing this up. The sooner we figure out what we are doing, the sooner we can stop turning away people wanting to give us money. ;)
The board has been talking for a while, and companies have asked for, other ways to sponsor GNOME outside of the Advisory Board. Diego kicked off a discussion on the marketing list about a year ago, but I wasn't able to quickly find the email.
I think you mean this one: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2010-June/msg00001.html Diego had some good ideas brewing.
First, some background: the GNOME Advisory Board[1] is made up of partners and sponsors who help sponsor GNOME financially. * Companies with more than 50 employees: $20,000 / year * Companies with less than 50 employees: $10,000 / year * Non-profits: $0
I wonder if it might be good to expand the definition of "Non-profits" a bit. The term "Non-profit" means different things in different countries. Perhaps we could expand this to more clearly include charities and other types of organizations focused on providing services to people in a charitable manner.
We would like to expand corporate sponsorships but we don't want to lessen the benefits for the Advisory Board partners. The major benefits to being on the Advisory Board are monthly Advisory Board calls with other members and the Foundation's board of directors and an annual meeting at GUADEC. (I'm not sure if the ED does anything above and beyond other than normal and expected communication). We've also had feedback from potential partners asking for smaller ways to give. I'd like to get the community's feedback on two additional potential levels: Level 1: $1000 / year Benefits: Logo added to foundation.gnome.org - This will be available to companies to show they sponsor GNOME financially - some companies like the validation to help show potential clients.
I think this is a good start, but I think it would be better to do more. A logo exchange on fdo alone seems a bit anemic to me. It seems that companies and other organizations are interested in giving us money for logo placement. I think we could offer more visibility for their logos based on how much money they provide: - On foundation.gnome.org - On Friends of GNOME - On gnome.org - Their logo placed somewhere at a certain # of events, or at a particular event. - Their logo placed in a way that associates them with a particular sub-group, such as a11y or Womens Outreach. - Logo placement in a regular publication, perhaps GNOME Journal could have a sponsors "page". - Perhaps association with a particular GNOME release. And it seems we could require higher donations for more or better visibility. It would be nice to see more options like this. It seems little work on our part if we can figure out how to organize the website to accommodate pages with logos for organizations that we acknowledge as sponsors. It might be tricky to manage how to best promote or endorse organizations in this sort of way. I can imagine RMS having issues with promoting Open Source related organizations if done at the expense of promoting free software, for example. But, I'd think we could address these concerns by setting up the program properly so we make sure that it is clear that we are not necessarily endorsing organizations who we acknowledge are providing donations.
Level 2: $5000 / year Benefits: Logo added to foundation.gnome.org and quarterly one on one call with the Executive Director. Same as above and an opportunity to share feedback with GNOME's CEO.
I think it is valuable to have an option like this, but I'd expect that most organizations would fall into category #1 above, and not really want this sort of access to the foundation. I think a third category is also really needed. It would be nice if there were a small donation fee (perhaps $200) that individual GNOME consultants or small consulting firms could pay in order to get themselves advertised on the GNOME website as being consulting contacts. I think this would appeal to many coders for hire out there, and would be a way for them to increase their relationship with GNOME directly.
While the benefits may not seem like much to some, it's a way for companies to give and show they are a part of the community. We'd have to come up with naming conventions for the other levels.
Why can't we do something similar like how FoG already works, but with different benefits for each level. The terms "Associate", "Sponsor" and "Philanthropist" seem fine. We could just have "Individual Associate/Sponsor/Philanthropist" and "Organization Associate/Sponsor/Philanthropist". No?
Lastly, as part of this, I'd like to revamp the foundation.gnome.org website for both these kind of corporate sponsors as well as those who have donated hardware to the Foundation, such as a potential offer for a new event box, Red Hat and Canonical for hosting our servers in their data centers and other things that are in the works.
Yes, it would be good to better thank those sponsors we have for all that they do. Do you anticipate the revamp will be to involve adding more thank you information, or also improving how the pages look? Brian -- marketing-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
