My trip to NY is cancelled

May 26, 2007

A while ago I started a campaign to visit the Future of Online advertising conference in New York. Since then I’ve been constantly talking to possible sponsors locally to see what they can mean to me. The main problem I was having is that this was on too short of a notice to have funds made available to me. Since time is short, I have to cancel the trip. Next time, better luck? No, next time, better preparation.

Lessons learned

Even though this project was to get me to NYC for the conference, the main purpose was to study the possibilities for someone in my position to gather donations and sponsoring to visit an event in a different country. And there are very valuable lessons I’ve learned in this process.

Asking online for donations
Asking complete for donations requires some sort of base of trust. When people online donate, they look for several things:

• Who are you? Who talk about you on the web, what do they say about you on the web? would those people talking about you offer their donation?
• How popular are you? It’s a fact that people want something back, so they consider your popularity to see if that what they get back will be worth it. I, with my less than 5000 unique visitors per month, may not have much to offer in return. And even if I did, like promising a links page for this project, the links would not weigh heavy enough, cause by that time, my blog was still PR NaN.
• Does your blog fit in their niche? Obviously, why would your blog readers be interested in a link to a site about Indian politics?
• What do I get out of this? This is probably the most important question. If what you offer is not appealing enough, don’t expect to get anything

If people can’t find satisfying answers to these questions, don’t expect them to pull out their checkbooks.

In this respect there are some aspects I didn’t pay enough attention to.

• I didn’t approach enough (or, the right) bloggers personally to ask for sponsoring. Now that leaves me wondering what could have been reached if they would be willing to sponsor me.
• The same goes for spreading the word. I could have asked some A-list bloggers to write about my quest, in trying to see if it’s possible for a beginning blogger to get help from the blogging community. I did ask some, of which I have regular contact with, but none of them wrote something about my project. I’m not blaming them, I’m just pointing out that I needed to try out contacting a lot more bloggers to help me spread the word. Yet another “What if” in my head.

The big problem is that people expect you to have a lot of traffic in order to do something for you. Understandably they want something back. But people who have a lot of traffic don’t need to ask for donations to visit such an event. They make enough money with their traffic to pay their own ways.

Looking for local sponsors
Local sponsors usually have set budgets. To dig into that budget you need to offer something worthy, because they need to see some results in their books after sponsoring. This means you need to filter out those who have something to gain from your trip. Promotion of any kind, that can guarantee conversion of the spent money.

Most companies (in small countries) that are able to sponsor have a lot of people who will want to know why that money is spent and how that money will convert to profit for the company. Smaller companies, with just one boss, or a small board, usually don’t have that kind of money available.

In any case, it’s extremely important that the company has enough time to have internal discussions about this sponsorship and decide on how to go about it. Sometimes the money may be available, but there are more pressing investments to make at the moment. Given enough time, more money could be accumulated, and if they know that sponsoring you is on their spending list, they will set that money apart for you.

So freeing resources for someone on short notice can only be done by large companies, who may have that money available, but the process of getting your request approved travels a longer road, which takes time.

Conclusion

So here’s what I learned from this experience.

• Don’t expect people to donate money to you if they don’t “know” you
• Make sure you can guarantee something useful in return.
• Plan ahead. One month is not enough time to plan your trip AND find sponsoring
• People need time to consider your request.
• Promote your project. And don’t be hesitant to make it a big promotion campaign. Think about it: if you need 200 people to donate $20 each, expect to need about 2000 to 5000 to read about it to get that number of people to donate.
• Don’t hesitate to ask other bloggers in your network for donations or for putting out a good word about your quest. The more of them you ask, the bigger the chances of getting some to help you out. My dad always said: “You already have NO, but you can get YES if you ask”. Not asking equals a negative answer, while asking could get you a positive answer.
• Learn from your mistakes and try again, or move on. Don’t let failure to get desired results knock you off. Analyse your mistakes and try again. In any case, move on, while keeping your chin up!

Words of thanks

I need to thank Nathan Metzger for helping me out with getting the ChipIn widget. Then there are also people like Andrew Kuo, who tried hard to help me to get ways to receive donations online. Rafiek is one of the very few who did make the effort of donating. Thanks to Matt Coddington who included a link to my project in last week’s top links without me asking for it. Thanks to Darren Rowse for providing the free pass to the conference and an opportunity to spread the word.

Thanks to everyone who, in any way, showed their support. If I don’t get to reward you for your good intentions, I’m positive that nature will.

Posted in General chatter