[Inpycon] Fwd: [Conferences] Sponsors and delegate contact info

[Noufal Ibrahim]

Outside information. :)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Douglas Napoleone <doug.napoleone at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 12:40 AM
Subject: Re: [Conferences] Sponsors and delegate contact info
To: Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com>
Cc: conferences at python.org




On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Noufal Ibrahim<noufal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>   I hope this mail finds you all in good health and spirits.
>
>   I haven't sent any mails to this list before so I'll start by
> saying that my name is Noufal Ibrahim and I'm heading the organisation
> of the first Indian Pycon scheduled to take place at the end of
> September 2009.
>
>   We're looking for corporate sponsors ie. companies in the country
> that are into Python and who we can make part of the local Python
> community. We have a couple of people who are interested and we're
> following up.
>
>   One of the things that a potential sponsor asked for is the list of
> delegates along with their contact information (email addresses). We
> never anticipated this and didn't put up a privacy policy on our site
> when we first launched. The support of this sponsor would go a long
> way in covering our costs and actually making the conference a
> success. They promise that they won't spam people. I presume that
> they're going to use it for their recruiting.   I'm in a bit of
> dilemma whether to accept or not.

We have often gotten this request from corporate sponsors and even
some people who claimed to be a sponsor but were not. We have never
given out this information to sponsors. We do have on our registration
form an opt-in for receiving e-mails from the PSF/Organizers, but this
does not include sponsors.

Instead we created a linked-in non-profit Conference group account and
whitelisted all registrants who checked off they were willing to
receive e-mails from us. This whitelist is not used by linked-in, nor
is a request sent unless you specifically ask for this. Those people
whom already have an account on linked in will notice that they can
join the group by clicking a button when they log in (or they can
dismiss it). We also allowed the sponsors to join the linked in group.

this provides a direct targeted group for the sponsors. These are only
people interested in actually hearing from sponsors, and provides a
single group e-mail address for them to contact attendees, and
provides them with much greater demographic information via public
profiles. This is a win-win for both attendees and sponsors.

If a anyone abuses the group (sponsor or attendee), as the maintainer
of the group you can remove them and block them.

I have only heard of one person not being satisfied by this option.
They had spammed the pycon-reg mailing list trying to get the
information and would never say exactly which sponsor they represented
(the e-mail was from a hotmail address.)

The create group page is here:
http://www.linkedin.com/createGroup?displayCreate=

and lists the control options.
You can upload a simple CSV file for a whitelist.

I require non-whitelisted accounts to be approved by the admins as we
get a bunch of marketing firms and sales people trying to join to
harvest information otherwise. I always check the requests against the
attendee list and request information from people whom do not match.
Most I never hear back from, the rest are up front about what they are
after.

Hope this helps.

  -Doug


>    A couple of the more experienced people tell me that this is a
> standard practice during most corporate conferences. I wanted to know
> if any of the other PyCon organisers faced such a situation and if
> they did, what was their course of action.
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> ~noufal
> http://nibrahim.net.in
> _______________________________________________
> Conferences mailing list: Conferences at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/conferences
>
> This is an open list with open archives; sensitive or confidential information should not be discussed here.
>




-- 
~noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in
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