[mpw-staff] sponsorship email

[Catherine Devlin]

Hi, MPW folks,

I need to apologize - I'm finally getting serious about finding our
sponsors, and am horrified to realize just how little time we've got
left to prepare - I dearly hope it's not too late to get sponsors
involved!  Sorry, my death march at work didn't end quite so cleanly
as I'd hoped.  It's a good thing that the BPW folks made such a good
curriculum that we don't need to put time into that, too!

Anyway, this is what I've drafted as a possible email to potential
sponsors.  Feedback?  I mean to get it sent out this weekend so that
it's in our prospects' inboxes by Monday morning.

I should discuss / sanity-check my cost estimates:

$600 food is based on $12 apiece times 40 attendees, plus teachers and
volunteers, and tax
$225 lodging: $99/night plus taxes etc - assuming Friday and Saturday
nights, and sharing one room
$275 childcare: we do have childcare development majors available for
$8/hr ($64 for an 8 hour day) - unfortunately, my potential source of
workers is 127 miles from Dayton, and I feel like paying them for
mileage is only fair... and 127 miles each way, X $0.55/mile, is $140!
 So $275 pays one car with two workers plus some slush for snacks; two
workers can handle roughly a dozen kids., and it would be great to
have two pair.  There may be some IndyPy volunteers to reinforce them
a little more.  This also assumes we'll only have childcare on
Saturday - otherwise we have to decide whether to make them make the
round trip twice, or put them up in a hotel, or what....

Alternately, we could try to quickly find a similar source of
childcare workers in Indianapolis itself, so the travel expenses would
cease to be a headache.

Thanks,
- Catherine

**********

In recent years, attention in the development community has focused on
ways to increase diversity among programmers.  One of the most
exciting efforts has been the Boston Python Workshop, described in
their PyCon 2012 presentation:

"How do you bring more women into programming communities with
long-term, measurable results? In this talk we’ll analyze one
successful effort, the Boston Python Workshop, which brought over 200
women into Boston’s Python community this year."

https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/the-boston-python-workshop-at-pycon-2012/

Now the Boston Python Worskshop team is joining IndyPy and regional
Python programmers Mel Chua and Catherine Devlin to duplicate the
workshop here in Indianapolis.  We expect to bring up to 40 women and
their friends into the development community, and to have impact far
beyond that by raising the profile of women developers in our region.

https://openhatch.org/wiki/Indianapolis_Python_Workshop

We would love to see your company involved as a sponsor!  Sponsorship
can bring you

- Reputation for supporting diversity in the tech community
- Name, logo, and weblink on event webpage
- Name and logo on event slides, handouts, posters, flyers
- Any handouts or swag you'd like to distribute to participants
- Name exposure among workshop participants, Indiana LinuxFest
attendees, IndyPy, and everyone who hears about the workshop
- If you'd like to attend to speak to participants directly, let us know!

Please consider sponsoring either

- Lunch for workshop participants ($600)
- Lodging for instructors from Boston ($225)
- On-premise childcare for workshop participants and (space
permitting) other Indiana LinuxFest attendees: $275 (2 sponsorships
available)
- We'd be happy to discuss custom sponsorship options!

Please contact catherine.devlin at gmail.com or mel at melchua.com with any
questions.  Thanks very much for your involvement!

- Catherine Devlin



-- 
- Catherine
http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com