On Sat, Feb 09, 2019 at 03:35:50PM -0600, Ted Gould wrote:
Aweseome, lots of good stuff here. On Feb 9 2019, at 1:48 am, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...2...> wrote:
- First, today we've gained one new Bronze Stylus sponsor, icons8.com.
Yay!
😂
- A second sponsor is in the works, we're just waiting on Conservancy for
processing, and should be annnounceable soon.
😂😂
- I have sent out renewal reminders to our current sponsors that have hit
their expiration date. I figure we should give them a week to reply before retiring their entries from the sponsor page.
Thank you for sending out those notices. We might consider waiting a little longer than that, or at least take a rely as reason to give them longer. I know for many businesses the process of processing a payment and getting approved can take more than a week.
I only expect an initial indication of interest in renewing within the week, you're right sometimes payment can take a while.
Also, even if the week passes, it doesn't mean that they can't renew later on, just that their logo won't be shown on the website in the interim.
- Should we think about increasing our Bronze sponsorship level?
Today SFC told me that they don't like to bother invoicing amounts below $1000, which makes things a bit difficult if our Bronze sponsors want invoices. So moving Bronze to $1000 may make sense just for accounting purposes.
I think that makes sense. That would set our levels to: $1000 $2000 $5000 $10K
I really want to set them to $1250 and $2500 just so they're all even doubles, but that's probably why I'm an engineer and not in marketing 😉
Yeah no kidding. :-)
But these particular values line up well with other organization sponsorship levels, so at least will not be of surprise.
- Is it time to add a Diamond level?
When we set up the sponsorship levels, we originally included a Diamond level, but were not sure what amount it should be and decided we'd leave it out and revisit when it seemed plausible that we might get one. Given that we have two platinum sponsors currently, it seems plausible now. What do others think?
Frankly, I agree with your logic, but I'm still hesitant. Let's say that we created a Diamond at $25K and someone gave it to us. What would we do with it? I feel like with our current plans and spending we'd have a hard time using that money. So, let's brainstorm some big ideas and figure out reasonable ways we could grow and then put the funds behind that, instead of ending up with money and nothing to spend it on. (I feel like that was rambling a bit, but I can't figure out a way to be more concise. Hopefully I got my point across.)
We had $23,313 in expenses for FY2018, so we've kept the spending side up pretty well. That said, there's only so much hackfesting we can practically do in a given year, and you're right we should do some brainstorming.
Funded development work (e.g. contract programming work) would be a logical thing to think about, and several of our sponsors have expressed interest here in supplying additional funds depending on what we undertake. There's a non-trivial amount of overhead work needed for doing contract management, though.
It might be worthwhile for us to take a look at some of our peer projects at SFC and see how others are using their funding.
Bryce