Micro-Sponsorships?

Ran across this idea from a local Blogger/Tweeter, @wyliemac, and I think it has some real intriguing possibility. I’ve often seen local events that I might want to help out, but because of other commitments I couldn’t volunteer, or attend, and even the lowest sponsorship levels are out of the question for an individual, so I wind up not doing anything.

In a blog post called Wyliemac Gives Back, Alvin lays out his idea:

And other than Startup Weekend, the big institutional investors seem reluctant to sponsor small niche tech events like the ones I put on. As a thank you to my sponsors, I’d like to give back by helping tech events in Columbus find sponsors. Little sponsors. You and I. The ones with “personal brands”.

I want to put together a syndicate of people that give a little to pool their money for sponsorship. The event will have a link to a landing page with all of the individual sponsors and we’ll also set up individual pages so you can get some Google juice.

As I said, an interesting idea for local events, which are pretty niche events by their nature most of the time, especially the first event he’s trying this with, which is a Ruby developer’s conference. Since I’m not a developer, I’ll just be watching to see how this works more than being directly involved, but I do wonder if this sort of model might work in the Legal Tech industry. Obviously, with all the vendors in the Litigation Support and e-Discovery space, there’s usually pretty good sponsorship, but I wonder if we couldn’t get a group of bloggers to create a cooperative effort like this? Maybe not for national events, but perhaps for some regional and local events?

What benefits, aside from the cooperative web page linked and promoted by the event, would make you consider donating $25 towards a sponsorship? What events do you want to support in that way, even without further benefit, if the opportunity was available?

Discuss….

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