SANDCamp 2010 Wrapup - Sponsors & Budget

This is a followup to the lightning talk at the February meetup. I wanted to post some facts and figures about the money that it takes to run a camp, and report on how awesome the sponsors were this year.

For those that don't know, I volunteered to coordinate the sponsors and incoming donations. Basically this means I spent a lot of time on the phone and writing emails to gauge interest, help them find a good level, collect money, make sure their sponsor nodes were created on the site, graphics were in place, and marketing materials submitted to the other organizers. It takes a lot more time than I thought it would :)

Next year I'd like to try and add some more of the bigger corporate sponsors, like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Qualcomm. These organizations are so large, the challenge really is finding the right person to talk to who can be your champion in the company and get the wheels turning.

Overall, I think the sponsorship went really well. The first thing any potential sponsor asks you is, "How much do you need?". Which is really hard to answer, since you haven't talked to vendors yet (usually) and your camp budget isn't set until you see how much people might give you. As a general rule of thumb, take the amount sponsors have pledged (this is usually very early in the process) and take about 75% of that, and that's what you'll actually take in. This way you can get an idea of how much is safe to spend long before the checks actually come in. You don't actually get checks from sponsors until very late in the process, sometimes the day of the camp, or even afterward.

The two biggest costs of any camp are usually Venue and Wireless Access. Since those were very generously donated by the Hall of Champions, we spent most of our money on food. Other possibilities could have been t-shirts or other takeaway swag, or spending more on the afterparty (drink tickets), or stuff like that.

There was also 1 gold sponsor that was initially interested, but dropped out pretty early in the process. The total initial amount pledged was $4150, and we ended up with about 82% of that, which I attribute to the community being very close-knit, and someone having a personal relationship with the sponsor.

Here is the data from the nice spreadsheet Kathy compiled about the budget for 2010...

Budget Summary

Sponsor Summary

Expenses