We thought long and hard about accepting sponsorships.
These days, it seems, everyone has some advertisement targeted to software developers...
After several Org Team Meetups on the topic, we reached a consensus that we will only open up a Catering sponsorship, so that we can have some snacks & drinks for every meetup.
In addition, after the discussion in this issue, we also opened the possibility of a Venue Sponsor, as long as they can provide their venue for free and without any unreasonable demands.
The list below describes what our catering sponsor gets in return:
- leaflets (on table at entrance),
- online banner on DevStaff website (with back-link do-follow),
- online banner on DevStaff Meetup.com group page,
- "Thank-you" message by organizers during Meetup (not by company),
- sponsor's slide in DevStaff Welcome presentation,
- facebook page post.
We did discuss about whether this sponsorship should be open to IT companies at all (so that we wouldn't face any competition / conflict of interest issues), however, we agreed that we will not place any explicit constraints for the time being.
To clarify, this does not mean we are opening our doors to any sponsor (for example, in the case where we had a single sponsorship offer from , we would be forced to accept it), rather that we are not explicitly excluding any companies from offering a sponsorship.
In general, we will only accept sponsorships from companies the Org Team approves and we prefer not having any sponsors than having some sponsor the community would feel uneasy about.