Quite a few of the conferences I've been to lately have had sponsors who were recruiting. Do we know enough about the sort of attendees we'll get to put that forward as a reason to sponsor?

Sponsorship Package Brainstorm: In addition to all the usual sponsorship benefits, I'm thinking of something like this: For each sponsor at a premium level, CyborgCampers produce a "cyborg" analysis of their business/products/services. What would that analysis look like? We will figure that out, but my guess is we could produce (and go on to productize) a cyborgian business analysis process that would give people a new and productive view of their businesses. Happy to flesh this out more if others find it interesting.

[moving this comment by @caseorganic to the thread]

Amber says <---I like this idea -- I already do this for businesses. Feasibility tests, UI's, calls to action...seeing if the product is actually something that has a great future relationship with humans. If not, we can advise ways to better integrate with humans in the future).

[moving this comment by @TiEsQue to the thread]

This is a cool idea, and I love creative ideas like this, but I see some potential points to consider.

1) If a company feels they do not need or want this analysis they may feel they are not "getting their money's worth" and be less inclined to sponsor at this level.

2) If a sponsor recieves services with a monetary or business value (rather than promotional value) in exchange for sponsoring they may not be allowed to call this "marketing", not be able to write this off as a marketing expense, and thus not able to pay for it out of a discressionary marketing budget. I wouldn't consider either of these deal-killers for the analysis idea, but you may want to take it into consideration in how you position/pitch the analysis. You may want to promote this as a cool fun extra benifit rather than one of the primary reasons to sponsor at at higher level.

[moving this comment by @TiEsQue to the thread]

3) Also, I'd strongly suggest letting all the sponsors address the crowd briefly- not just the high level sponsors. For one thing, you may only get a bunch of small local sponosors (Ignite Portland has never gotten a $1,000 sponsorship). And you really do want to show small sponsors love. Don't undervalue them! Usually they're the most enthusiatic sponsors that really "get" what you're doing, they'll voluteer to help, they will promote attendence on their websites, employees and friend, and refer other sponsors to you IF they feel valued. If you do land a big sponsor, they often just write a check and may not even show up. It would be great if you got $1,000 from Microsoft, but dreadful if you had a dozen cool smaller local sponsors but MSFT was the only one that got to hear applause from the crowd. Yuk! At that point you may lose a bunch of smaller sponsors for the next CyborgCamp.

However, I am confused by "Focus in special CyborgCamp session". Please forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but if that means that in exchange for sponsorship, the sponsor will be featured in a camp session, I am very much opposed to this sort to advertorial approach. I believe that runs counter to the open & egalitarian Camp spirit and I think any perception of paid content would meet some strong criticism from attendees.

BTW, I think this event is going to ROCK. Keep the creative ideas coming!

@TiEsQue:

Thanks for taking the time to think this through—your viewpoint is very welcome. I'm not entirely sure @caseorganic is thinking along the same lines as I, as we haven't really had a chance to talk about the idea much yet, but here's what I was thinking.

I was imagining a session that wasn't really a typical sponsor "advertorial", but rather a demonstration of this cyborg analysis I mention with sponsors as the subjects of the analysis, driven not by the sponsors, but by the "independent" session leaders. I expect the analysis to be interesting in its own right, and it could be applied to almost anything. Applying it to sponsors just makes more sense than picking something arbitrary. I've seen similar things like the SEO "hot seats" Kent Lewis is involved in where companies pay to have their SEO analyzed live.

As for your points 1-2 about the "real" value of the analysis and its tax status: You may be right that we should cast it differently. I was thinking anyone that would want to sponsor this offbeat event would welcome its "experiments", but we should probably makes sure we fit comfortably within current business practices.

Help us stay on track!

I think the live cyborg analysis is a very cool idea, but one which some sponsors may view with horror. Just sayin'.
Maybe we could have other incentives?

@TiEsQue: and help us trim more things. And then more. And then some more. Until the logistic is actually *workable* for an event that’s coming in less than 2 months ;)