The Next Steps

[Matt Follett]

Hey all,

Thanks to Sarah's excellent work in getting us a location at Wash U we can finally move on to the next steps.  I would say we could be looking at a few things concurrently:
1)  Sponsorship - If we can get enough sponsorship that the $200 isn't too big of a bite in our food budget then I think it would still make sense to try and offer food.  If we can't then there are other things we could use sponsorship for (e.g. shirts for people who speak or help out).  We have two sponsors so far I will check with.  If anyone wants to help try and look into more sponsorship that would be a big help, I don't have a lot of connections with companies that would be interested in doing this.

2)  Advertising - Since we have a location and a place we could start designing fliers to place around and send to the various relevant lists of St. Louis and the surrounding area to start getting people interested.  If there are people who are artistically endowed and interested in making fliers let me know.

3)  We need to come up with all the useful info we can throw into the wiki and start filling that so people have a central source for all things STL BarCamp '09.  What do people think would be good to put up?

thanks,
Matt Follett

[Alex Miller]

I'll mention it in my next attendee email blast for Strange Loop and if you have some fliers, you can put those out too.  I wish there was a better place to centralize all the St.Louis tech events. I'm tempted to put up a site for it in fact.  I think best advertising is to focus on user groups and Twitter - that's where you can hit groups of developers. 

I'm happy to help with finding sponsors although in my experience it's helpful to have something concrete to ask for and an explanation of the value to the sponsor (what is the audience, expected attendance, event particulars, where sponsorship goes, etc).  If you're collecting money I would recommend either having sponsors pay for a specific thing (shirts, food, whatever) and preferably pay them directly OR it might make sense to actually incorporate and form a non-profit org if you think this will be an ongoing thing such that having a legal entity would help.  Once you cross a certain $ threshold, sponsors typically want to pay via purchase order which requires a federal EIN number and a bank account.  Incorporation costs about $160, the EIN request is free. Happy to help with that. 

I would recommend setting up a registration site on http://eventbrite.com so that you can have someplace to point people and start gathering registration info.  Would be good to put up a simple web site / wiki too.

[Brad Hogenmiller]

I'd agree on promotion. Twitter, user groups, and linkedin groups seem to be the best place to promote. If anyone wants to kick out some consistent copy, I'm happy to push the message in the Social Media Club, STL Twitter, and other groups i'm involved in.

Is there a Twitter account set up yet?

-=Brad

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[Matt Follett]

On Sep 19, 2009, at 9:37 AM, Brad Hogenmiller wrote:

I'd agree on promotion. Twitter, user groups, and linkedin groups seem to be the best place to promote. If anyone wants to kick out some consistent copy, I'm happy to push the message in the Social Media Club, STL Twitter, and other groups i'm involved in.

Is there a Twitter account set up yet?

Great idea, we do now: BarCampSTL .

~Matt

[Matt Follett]

On Sep 19, 2009, at 8:44 AM, Alex Miller wrote:

I'll mention it in my next attendee email blast for Strange Loop and if you have some fliers, you can put those out too.  I wish there was a better place to centralize all the St.Louis tech events. I'm tempted to put up a site for it in fact. 

I have been too!  HACKFEST!!

I think best advertising is to focus on user groups and Twitter - that's where you can hit groups of developers.  

sounds good, I wouldn't want to rule out non-developers.  If someone came in to talk about something out in left field to me that'd be a plus.

I'm happy to help with finding sponsors although in my experience it's helpful to have something concrete to ask for and an explanation of the value to the sponsor (what is the audience, expected attendance, event particulars, where sponsorship goes, etc). 

Agreed, I will place this information on our wiki page http://www.barcamp.org/BarCamp-Saint-Louis-2009 .

If you're collecting money I would recommend either having sponsors pay for a specific thing (shirts, food, whatever) and preferably pay them directly

Agreed.  The BarCamp site says they recommend having sponsors buy things also to cut down on complications.  A couple other BarCamps have accepted money, but done so only through PayPal to handle the accounting.  I think for this one I would rather have things donated.

OR it might make sense to actually incorporate and form a non-profit org if you think this will be an ongoing thing such that having a legal entity would help.  Once you cross a certain $ threshold, sponsors typically want to pay via purchase order which requires a federal EIN number and a bank account.  Incorporation costs about $160, the EIN request is free. Happy to help with that.  

Good idea!  I remember people were already talking about doing one again next year.

I would recommend setting up a registration site on http://eventbrite.com so that you can have someplace to point people and start gathering registration info.  Would be good to put up a simple web site / wiki too.

Great idea, it looks like EventBrite charges per ticket though.  I think I'll setup a Google Form for registration and that can drop all of the info into a spreadsheet.

[Todd 'tojosan' Jordan]

On the one last year, Network Solutions footed the bill on all
accounts. Not sure what the total out of pocket was for them.