2007 was the first year that we have had Annual Sponsors and it has been great! It's time to renew our sponsors for next year and pick up some new ones as well. At this time we have four openings in our annual sponsorship program for 2008. Please pass along the following information to any company you might think has an interest in becoming an annual sponsor:
CINNUG was created over three years ago to provide a place for practicing .NET developers to expand their knowledge and network with other .Netters, but anyone who is interested in learning more about .Net is more than welcome. We meet monthly to watch technology presentations that focus on learning and utilizing the .Net framework to the fullest extent, best practices, and cutting edge programming tools and new technologies. Our speakers are drawn from local professionals and nationally known speakers. Our group has grown over the last year from an average of twenty-five attendees a month to close to forty each meeting. Our website registration and newsletter membership is over two hundred local .Net professionals. We are also a non-profit organization in the State of Ohio, a status we obtained just under one year ago. You can learn more about us at www.cinnug.org.
Since we are a non-profit organization and attendance to our meetings is free to our members, we rely on annual sponsors for funding. We have little overhead cost associated with our group since MAX Technical Training graciously provides us a free meeting space for our meetings and Server Intellect provides us free web hosting; however, even with this little overhead we do have expenses, such as refreshments for our meetings and domain renewal fees. Each year we contact companies that we believe have a stake in the local .Net community and ask if they would be interested in supporting the User Group as annual sponsors. While we contact several companies to see if they are interested, we only accept five annual sponsors. At this time there are four openings for the 2008 Sponsorship year, which runs from January 1st 2008 to December 31st 2008.
The benefits of being an annual sponsors are:
- A listing on the CINNUG home page in our sponsorship ads. The banner cannot exceed 150 px by 150 px. This banner may be rotated with our other sponsors.
- Ability to use the CINNUG logo, with approval, on your site as a way of saying you support us.
- Recognition in pre-meeting slides. These are displayed prior to every meeting.
- Provide pre-approved handouts and flyers for the meeting attendees. These are laid out for the taking on a table outside the meeting area. This can be information about your company, products you may be selling, recruiting needs you may have, or services you provide. This is for any meeting during the sponsorship year.
- A listing on the CINNUG sponsor page that can include a large banner and a paragraph description of the sponsoring company.
The cost of an annual sponsorship is $1,000.00. As you are weighing the benefits versus the cost of a sponsorship, please consider the following:
- A single job posting on Monster.Com for Cincinnati, OH is $385.00 *.
- To post an advertisement for your product in MSDN Magazine it costs $1,650 per issue. That’s signing a 6 issue agreement and doesn’t even get you an entire page. **
Here are some examples of what your sponsorship can help provide for the group:
- Covering costs for domain registrations for cinnug.org, cinnug.net and cinnug.com.
- Covering costs for our member newsletter services.
- Covering costs for refreshments at our meetings (pizza and drinks).
- Covering costs for a few of our giveaways and door prizes that we give out at each meeting.
- Covering costs to bring in nationally known speakers.
If your target audience are .Net professionals who are passionate about technology and motivated enough to take time out of their own schedule and lives to attend monthly meetings and learn more about technology, then you can’t ask for a better deal. If your company is interested in becoming an annual sponsors, or you have questions about the sponsorship program, please contact us through the contact form found at http://cinnug.org/blogs/blog/contact.aspx and we can work out the details.
If you would like to help out, but are not currently in a position to become an annual sponsor, please let us know. CINNUG, in conjunction with the Dayton .Net Developer’s Group, hosts a free Code Camp each year that you can help with as well.*** This year we are looking to host the event in April.
Michael Wood
CINNUG Director
* Price taken from Monster.com, based on a Quick Buy price quoted for Cincinnati, OH.
** Price quote taken from <http://www.componentsource.com/services/publisher/marketing-magazine-advertising.html>
*** Please note that sponsorship of CINNUG does not provide sponsorship benefits for the Code Camp.