Pizza & beer sponsorships

[Rico Jones]

Hey All,

Sorry, I went through a time warp last week after getting sick and forgot most of the contents of our discussion about pizza & beer sponsorships at the monthly meetings.

Airbnb wants to sponsor Pizza + Beer the March meeting. What are we offering them in return? I had originally assumed that we would give them 10-15 minutes before the talks like we did for HP, but some folks expressed that they didn’t like the way the HP thing went off.

I personally think $650 (what pizza & beer typically cost) to spend 10 minutes pitching working at your company to 75+ devs is a decent tradeoff for both parties, but I’m just one drop in the ocean. If we didn’t like how the HP thing worked out, what should be different about it?

I think we should consider what we would be okay with if New Relic were not a perpetual sponsor (because they might not be one day...).

Regards,
Rico

[Shawna Scott]

Rico, it seemed to me that the consensus was essentially "show not tell." If Airbnb wants to convince people to work there, they can give a talk with content about Ruby demonstrating an interesting thing from their stack or an interesting problem their devs might work on, and also announce that they are hiring. We also discussed designating a space for people to come talk to sponsors about general "come work for us" stuff.

Everyone else, please add or correct if I've overlooked part of that :)

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[Rico Jones]

I guess I would like to push back against that consensus a little bit, because I don’t think it’s a healthy long term stance to have toward sponsors.

Right now, the best way to describe our situation with New Relic is that we’re in a circumstance where money grows on trees. Because we have some influential people at New Relic who care about us, venue and food & beverage sponsorship is always taken care of. But this could easily change. For this reason, I think it’s important to the long term health of the group to regularly get other companies involved in sponsoring the group.

And what we’re offering right now in exchange for sponsoring pizza and beer is essentially a mention during the announcements (because a company’s engineers can already give a talk and plug working for their company without sponsoring; this happens all the time). I think $650 for a mention during announcements is hard sell for the technical recruiter at a potential sponsor to take to their manager.

I also think the sponsor spots are not really a bad thing to have at the meeting. For instance, I learned from the HP presentation that HP has an office here, that they have a Rails team, and that the Rails team is working in a growing part of the company. Maybe some people don’t find that information useful, but the vast majority of our constituency either currently earn a living writing Ruby, or plan to in the future, so I think showcasing local companies is actually a good fit.

So that’s why I think we should reconsider how we do sponsorships. Thoughts on the points above? Would it be useful to send out a survey that asks some questions like:

Do you attend meetings regularly? Yes / No
Would you be okay with a 10 minutes sponsor spot before the talks begin? Yes / No

We could also work with sponsors ahead of time to make sure their pitch is better suited to what we want to hear.

-Rico

[Lucas Charles]

I think Rico brings up some solid points and it would make sense to me to give sponsor positions something a bit more elevated than what any company is able to offer at meetups. +1. I'd also be okay with the 10 minute sponsor spot in the beginning, especially if it was discussed beforehand to make sure the pitch felt right.

Of course on that note, I dont attend meetings nearly as regularly as others do anymore, so take my opinion with a sizeable hunk of salt ;)

[Shawna Scott]

I can understand these concerns, but I think there are some other points to consider. 

1) In many ways, I think it's an over optimization, since we have yet to have problems finding sponsors when needed in the past, both for meetings and for extras like the 10th anniversary party budget.

2) I think it's optically not great, since we've never offered this opportunity to previous very generous and ongoing sponsors such as New Relic and CrowdCompass.

3) I think it disincentivizes long-term sponsorship and hosting (which under this model would provide no continued meaningful opportunity for  companies to benefit).

4) I think pizza and beer is frankly tangential to the meetups. It's clearly very nice to have, but I personally would attend regardless.

My final reason is an ethical/personal one, so I will list it separately. But I think that companies have a vested interest in supporting ongoing learning in their developers, and so should contribute to the community as an offset for receiving free labor from the open source community (which many PDX Ruby members are contributors to) and for rarely providing cohesive, meaningful opportunities to learn during work hours, despite being directly benefitted by helping developers learn and grow. Frankly, I think $650 every once in a while is a very small price to pay for those things. Regardless, I fail to see how selling our members' time is in line with the goals of the organization.

If the consensus comes down to go ahead with these sponsorship slots despite all these reasons, I propose that the sponsor slot be after the talks, not before.

[Rico Jones]

Some thoughts on a few of the points Shawna brought up:

> 2) I think it's optically not great, since we've never offered this opportunity to previous very generous and ongoing sponsors such as New Relic and CrowdCompass.

I was not here during the CrowdCompass era, so I can’t comment on that, but New Relic has, up until Jonan left, absolutely dominated the announcements segment of the meeting. Hearing 3 separate pitches from them is/was pretty common. I think everyone was mostly okay with it because they sponsor the venue, food, and beverages (and because Jonan delivers his pitches so well).

Would we have been okay with that if it had come from ITMotives, who doesn’t sponsor?

> 3) I think it disincentivizes long-term sponsorship and hosting (which under this model would provide no continued meaningful opportunity for companies to benefit).

I agree with the consensus we reached regarding the meeting venue: New Relic is a great host and we should stay put. I’m just talking about pizza & beer. I don't see how rotating that has a negative effect on the group…

> I fail to see how selling our members' time is in line with the goals of the organization.

I think this is a pretty simplistic view of sponsorship and sponsor pitches. Our group is, essentially, a professional development group. Most of our constituency would not be there if they’re couldn’t accomplish some goal that furthers their career, whether that be improving their programming skills or networking with engineers and employers. I think putting local companies in front of attendees for 10 minutes is actually attractive to some portion of our attendees. I mean, not everybody is as plugged into the community as the people organizing the local programming meetup, you know?

-Rico

[Rico Jones]

Jason Dinsmore suggested what might be a workable compromise on the #pdxruby-bizness channel. He asked:

“Would being included on the intro slides in a somewhat prominent way, plugged by the emcee, and maybe having the ability to set up a little table or something in the foyer be enough? seems like that is about all that conference sponsors get”

Would this, plus, say, 2 minutes for the sponsor to introduce themselves and their company be more palatable?

-Rico

[Brent Miller]

+1 from me. Speaking both as an attendee and as a sponsor. :)

I don’t like the notion of not getting something concretely defined for the sponsorship, but I also don’t like the notion of having to sit through a 10-minute pitch. I could live with 2 minutes, though; that’s a good elevator pitch. You should be able to get the point across.

Brent

=======================================================
Brent Miller
Owner and Principal
Foliosus Web Design LLC
http://foliosus.com/

"The problem is that once you have done away with the
ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true
and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All
that remains is clog dancing and macrame."
-- Neal Stephenson
=======================================================

[Jonan Scheffler]

I'm clearly missing some context here as I've been our of the loop with some personal stuff lately, but is the plan to find sponsors to buy pizza and beer instead of New Relic? I like this idea much more if we sell a sponsorship each meeting and bank the cash for a rainy day. No sense in separating the venue from the food & drink while we're at New Relic.

I think a 2 minute pitch is perfectly reasonable, I'll even volunteer to be their pitch guy if they're looking for someone to present about their company. I think I can make it interesting.

Having the pitch at the end of the meeting destroys the value, I think we could do it at the beginning. Also add a shout out at the start of the break and we point out their recruiter once more for people to go find. 

It adds value for attendees in presenting career options and in the future when we may lose our generous host and they still get beer. 

I also don't feel like we are slighting New Relic in the least. I personally referred 6 candidates directly out of the PDX.rb pool while I worked there. At $20k each (typical recruiter commission) that's $120k, they haven't even come close to gifting us that much in venue/beer/pizza. I am obviously very grateful to New Relic, but I don't think they've ever gotten a raw deal. It's a business decision for them, and an especially good one. 

So again my proposal is that we give them 2 minutes at the start of the meeting, bank the entire $500-650 for a rainy day, let them hand out stickers and one of us points people to their recruiter at the break. They get to be on the slides and the site as well. We could put together a nice prospectus and put it on the site to detail the offer for them. 

It's a good deal for them and for us, let's ship it. 

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

There's been a fair bit of discussion about funding at the last two meetings, and handling sponsor money adds rather a lot of organizational overhead that I don't think anybody is prepared to manage. Aside from that, a pitch at the beginning seems like a good compromise as long as it's strictly timeboxed. (I've sat through too many conference intros where a sponsor kept the mic and blathered on.)

--

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[Jesse Cooke]

Yeah, I'm opposed to us managing money. No one else does (via my informal survey) and we can offload all of the complications onto companies w/o having to have any dollars in an account somewhere.