Aweseome, lots of good stuff here.
On Feb 9 2019, at 1:48 am, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...2...> wrote:
1. First, today we've gained one new Bronze Stylus sponsor, icons8.com.
Yay!
😂
2. A second sponsor is in the works, we're just waiting on Conservancy for
processing, and should be annnounceable soon.
😂😂
3. 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.
4. 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 😉
5. 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.)
6. Do we want to increase other sponsorship levels?
I'm guessing no, but if the board thinks we should this might be a good
time to do so. We may want to do some TBD grandfathering of existing
sponsors.
I'm good with where they are (other than making it mathematically more exciting) but happy to listen to other's thoughts.
7. In order to improve our tracking of sponsors a little, I've added a
private "Financial" sub-group to inkscape-board in gitlab, with a
"sponsors" project under it:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape-board/financial/sponsors/issues
I figure we can use the issues tracker with each issue used for a
separate sponsor. I'm treating the issue description as a
semi-structured data record in YAML format, in case some day we want to
tack on tools or integrate with other stuff. For now though it'll just
be maintained manually, but this should hopefully permit >1 bus factor
on sponsor management.
Since Financial is a sub-group of the board, it is possible to add other
highly trusted but non-board people to only this group. I've added
Maren since due to her heavy involvement in sponsors and other financial
matters in the past.
+1, thanks for setting this up!
8. I have also added a Legal sub-group to inkscape-board, with a project
for focusing on branding issues like trademark infringement
investigations. This is also a private group, so only visible to board
members plus trusted non-board people. I've added Pamela Chestek and
Denver Gingerich, who are Conservancy lawyers that have worked with us
on some of these issues in the past.
+1, great!
Ted