[committee] Draft sponsorship letter to Sun

[David Adam]

(It's NEVER a good idea to elect two people who like the sound of their
own voice/writing style to committe; and honestly, people, making them
both Dav.ds was just irresponsible.)

Davyd and the rest of committee:

On Sat, 18 Mar 2006, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> Ok. Here is a draft of a letter to Sun.
>
> I am thinking big this year. As a club, we're renowned for doing stuff
> that is particularly cool. We should make an attempt to go after some of
> the bigger corporates to try and get some sponsorship.

AMERICA! FU- oh, right. Sorry, the thought of lots of money is getting me
excited.

> This list I've got in my head so far includes:
>  - Sun
>  - Redhat
>  - Canonical
>  - HP (maybe)
>  - Dell
>  - Optus (maybe)
>  - IBM

Yes, I like this. However:

- we still haven't fulfilled our sponsorship obligations to Linux
Australia. I am not happy for us to go pursuing more sponsorship until
we've proved that we'll meet the conditions of taking people's money.

- these are all great companies, but you've forgotten two big proprietary
companies who are have both quite kind to the chronically short-of-cash:

* Apple. I don't know if their hip new image includes the University
Computer Club, but if we have to hire dancers to fill the room when
they're looking at the webcams then so be it. (I've got a court order
against dancing in public, but no-one has to know that.)

* Microsoft. All flames to /dev/null, please - how much bigger can we
think?  They're handing out Action Pack stuff left right and centre to
commerical groups for $notmuch - they might give it to us for $nominal or
even $0.

- my experience with sponsorship for AMSA Convention (an event which
garners five figures of sponsorship) and other bodies is that writing and
asking for generalised 'sponsorship' (or even sponsership) is unlikely to
produce optimum results.

IMO, a good sponsorship letter says:
* what we want (hardware/software/free t-shirts/$5000)
* why we are a good investment
* what we do in return (you've got this down, although could we offer
  them something more? 'pay for part of our t-shirt costs so we can sell
  them for $5, and we'll splash your logo over the back')

Why -wouldn't- Sun want a dozen UCC members wearing those (rather spiffy)
OpenSolaris shirts that the MINCS guys were sporting the other night? Why
-wouldn't- Microsoft want a copy of Visual Studio on every UCC machine?
Ask for random promotional material! Ask for things that don't cost
sponsors any money, as well as those that do! Ask for Truth, Justice and
freedom! (They're cheap, for one thing.)

> It would also be nice to go after some of the locals:
>  - iiNet
>  - Boffins
>
> Perhaps also go after a brewery? In my collation of lists of UCC-like
> societies, I did notice some number of breweries in their sponsors
> lists. So perhaps not the stupidest idea.

They're all good ideas for sponsoring events, too. Prizes and so forth.
Perhaps we can get some sponsorship for things like intervarsityLAN, too.
Real prizes, yo.

I don't know how much people prefer price over quality, but it might be
worth wandering over to Broadway Pizza and asking if they'll give us a
good rate on pizza if we order from there regularly.

I'd like to discuss this more at either this week's or next week's
meeting. I also don't want Davyd to have to do all the work, so other
volunteers are required (you don't even have to be on committee - Davyd,
Frenchie or I can countersign things).

Sam - get a bigger calculator, yours may not have enough zeros.

David Adam
(now with tendonitis from waving hands so much)
UCC 33rd President
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au