Finding sponsors, was: Re: [EuroPython] Sharing EPC financial risk

[Magnus Lyckå]

At 10:53 2003-07-08 +0200, Tom Deprez wrote:
>This all concludes to me that nobody in the python world really wants to pay
>for things like this (see last 2 EPC years). If now at a sudden they would,
>it would make me happy, but I would also have a bitter feeling.

Python companies are growing, and the EPC is getting more important.
Perhaps it will get more interesting to be a sponsor.

Andy Robinson recently wrote:
"I felt something very exciting this year: there is a real Python 'economy'
in Europe, with real firms and customers making connections at EuroPython.
First time for me was fun but not commercially justifiable; from now on I
regard it as commercially essential."

AB Strakt is now sponsoring other events, so there are obviously European
Python companies with a marketing budget. See http://www.strakt.com/news.html

Of course, it depends on what goals these companies have, what they
are looking for, and what they think EPC can offer. For instance,
Secret Labs is a Swedish company making money on Python development,
but their main customers are organizations that work with meteorological
information. Will they find their customers at EPC? Hardly... Would they
benefit from visibility at EPC anyway? Maybe? Perhaps they need to help
to see that...

Strakt seems to view the public sector as a good source of customers
for them. Will they find those customers at EPC? Perhaps not. On the
other hand, there might well be other potential business partners there.
Jacob and Laura obviously knows EPC very well, but for many companies it
might take some kind of sales effort to mke them consider sponsoring the
EPC.

Of course, you can't put a lot of hours to convince a company to pay
EUR 200...but maybe someone can formulate a decent way to sell these
sponsorship ideas to others.

Dario talked about finding sponsors, so I guess he has some experience
of this.

>Also see the Zope-Europe association, how hard it is form them to get some
>company members.
>This all sounds nice in theory, but in practice it doesn't.

It's always possible to fail, that doesn't mean that the fundamental
idea is flawed. Considering how often software development projects
fail, it's easy to draw the conclusion that software development is
in general a flawed concept. I doesn't work!

We know this isn't true. It's quite possible to succeed in software
development, and it's quite possible to fail. As professional software
developers, we're typcally not qute as good at finding sponsors etc
as we are at developing software. I guess we have to learn...

Perhaps we need to think more about how sponsoring can create a value
for the sponsors, and a little less about how we can get money. I think
we will get money if we can provide a value. I'm not sure providing
value means that sponsorships are in any way different than today, but
I think we need to look at them from the sponsors perspective. What is
the value for them? How can we convey that? Perhaps we can change some
part of the EPC so that it gets better for both sponsors and visitors?



--
Magnus Lycka (It's really Lyckå), magnus@thinkware.se
Thinkware AB, Sweden, www.thinkware.se
I code Python ~ The Agile Programming Language