[Bundle-sponsorship-wg] International PyCon Prospectus

[Nick Coghlan]

Thanks for the update Betsy, this looks excellent! I added a few
suggested tweaks to the introductory section of the doc.

On 12 March 2016 at 05:12, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at python.org> wrote:
> Well, ask them whether they are up to finding, reaching out to,
> signing up, and (most importantly) adding 10+ different conference
> organizers to their procurement systems :-) (oh, and if they still
> don't buy it, mention that they'll have to deal with orgs and
> VAT in 10+ different countries)

We already do - one of the benefits of Red Hat being so distributed is
that local conference sponsorship wrangling can frequently be
delegated to the in-country Red Hat offices (and in most cases the
folks requesting the sponsorships are Red Hatters either on the
organising committees or friends with members of the organising
committees, and hence relatively happy to jump through the hoops of
our supplier management system). As a result, compared to actually
*running* offices in 35+ countries, also sponsoring community
conferences in each of those countries isn't that bothersome.

That was my original motivation to advocate for the discounts in the
original prospectus draft - I was pretty sure we'd be prepared to
accept a 3% overhead for the "All the PyCons" option, but not a 15%
one. The potential for anchoring prospective sponsors on 15% for the a
la carte admin fees, and then using the 50% and 80% fee discounts to
help upsell them on the bundles was then an added bonus.

> Instead they just have to deal with a single billing partner:
> the PSF, registered in the US, and we'll take of the rest.
>
> The 15% admin fee is well worth the reduced overhead they
> will have on their side. In fact, it will probably not fully
> cover our costs; and we don't have to set up procurement
> systems for those conferences.

I think Red Hat's a pretty unique case - most multinational
organisations Red Hat's size or larger won't have our experience
working with open source community conferences (so "we deal with the
community organisers so you don't have to" works better as a pitch),
while most other organisations that have a similar amount of
experience working with open source communities don't have our
international footprint (so "we help you reach communities you
otherwise couldn't" works better as a pitch).

As far as covering costs goes, I think an important aspect of that
will be to be clear that bundling carries an expectation of reduced
customisation of benefits, at least at the PSF level - hence the fee
discounts. Our main roles here should be to:

* provide an easy way for potential sponsor organisations to survey a
list of available Python conference sponsorships
* handle redistribution of the funding from sponsor organisations to
community conference organisers
* making connections between conference organisers and sponsor
representatives to discuss customisation options

We don't want to end up in situations where a PSF staff member is
relaying information back and forth between conference organisers and
sponsor representatives - beyond the financial side of things, we want
to be encouraging folks to work together directly.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia