Every once in a while Tom and I get caught up in organizing a conference and lose sight of what really makes us, us.
Sure we organize conferences, but that’s not that hard part, lots of others do it (to varying degrees of sucess). What makes 360|Conferences different is that we’re about community. What took us a while to realize is that the community we’re about is actually two communities.
We’ve served the developer community faithfully from the start, pricing our events so that anyone can afford to attend, making our events about technology not marketing, making our events about community not cliques. We take what we learn and what we’re told and grow our events based on that knowledge.
But what about sponsors? From the start Tom and I approached event sponsorship just like every other conference organizer (albeit we started much less expensive), having levels, based on minerals (why is that the norm? LOL), essentially forcing sponsors into a 3 size fits all equation.
That changes today. Why should sponsors spend 10, 20, 30, more thousand dollars for 2 of this, 1 of these, a booth table, etc. when maybe all they need is 2 passes to the conference and an expo booth, or maybe just room on the USB key, or access to email attendees?
As of this morning, sponsorship for 360|Flex is $1,000. That’s it, if you want your logo on the website, and 1 pass to the conference, you’re done. If you’d like a booth in the expo area, add that on. If you’d like to have a banner on the eventvue community site, add that on. If you need more conferences passes add those on.
Each sponsor can build the sponsorship that suits their needs, paying only for what they want out of the conference.
We think this is pretty big. Conferences charge sponsors way too much to participate, and offer way too little to those sponsors in return for their money. We want to change that paradigm, sponsors are a conferences partners, and more than that, they’re a community too, and we’ve decided that our business partners and sponsor community deserve better treatment than what they get from other conferences.