This is a collection of ideas to further improve the DebConf fundraising from other conference organization experiences of AnisaKuci and DLange. Please feel free to add more ideas.
Fundraising Best Practices
- Work through personal contacts
- Stay very professional and correct in your communication (emails have a greeting at the front and closing formula at the end)
- Offer special perks e.g. the drinks at the reception, cake for the afternoon break, sponsoring conference dinner, as an add-on to existing sponsorship levels or offer these to local companies only
- Give special attention or even consider paying someone (if needed) to do professional graphics work e.g. a logo, visual ID or making fundraising material appear visually pleasing and well structured
- Come up with nice tag lines / claims e.g. : "Internet of people" (OSCAL 2017), "Who's watching" (LCA 2020)
- Come up with a theme to make the event special every year and give some inspiration and guidance on context, surrounding events and visual identity
- Try to get sponsors who might be interested in the location or attendees but not necessarily in free software directly e.g. lifestyle brands, coffee companies etc
- Guerrilla marketing
- Give presentations in local universities to attract students / post-grads joining the conference
- Ask on Twitter to DM for getting into contact on sponsorship, Debian has 200,000+ followers on Twitter
- Get funding from public sources, multi-national organizations like UN, OSCE etc
- Multinational institutions and local government functions attract each other
Promote the event with distributing business cards at FOSDEM, LCA and other large community events before the DebConf
- Keep a record of press coverage (announcement of winning bid), may be team interviews etc. and use it on your initial potential sponsor contact
- Co-branding merchandise or preferential offers to attendees