Letter to venue sponsor

AdaCamp was a two-day unconference dedicated to increasing women’s participation in open technology and culture. This sample letter is part of the AdaCamp Toolkit, which helps you take AdaCamp’s tools and practices and apply them to your own event. You can re-use the text of this page freely by the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. Optionally, you may credit the AdaCamp Toolkit.

About this letter

AdaCamps were frequently hosted by a donated venue. This introductory letter is designed to introduce AdaCamp-like events (unconferences of up to 200 people, which are invitation-only) to potential hosts so that they can decide if they can host your event.

Template letter

Dear SPONSOR,

Thank you very much for offering to donate a venue to ORGANIZATION for use for EVENT! This document will help you understand how to work with us as a venue sponsor, and allow you to assess whether or not your space is suitable for EVENT. We are happy to discuss any aspect of this document if you have questions.

This document has basic details of our needs. When we are working together on EVENT, we will provide a detailed venue and equipment checklist to you in good time to discuss any changes we need to make to our event to have it work best in your space.

About EVENT

[Your conference blurb here.]

About hosting EVENT as a venue sponsor

Our facilities needs are:

a large room which can hold NUMBER attendees for plenary sessions
a large room (often the same as above) where buffet meals can be served by caterers and eaten by attendees
NUMBER of smaller meeting rooms which can hold around five to ten attendees, with seating to match
a room for our childcare provider and the children in their care (usually NUMBER carers and NUMBER children)
a room for our “quiet” space, where attendees can rest or work undisturbed
a private space for nursing/pumping

All spaces must be wheelchair accessible (and we would like to use painters tape to demarcate access paths).

Our furniture needs are:

seating in the large room for all attendees
seating in smaller meeting rooms for five to ten people
tables for caterers to serve buffet meals
a mix of office furniture and comfortable furnishings (eg sofas, beanbags) in the quiet room

Our equipment needs are:

a projector, microphone and speakers for the large plenary room
venue-wide WiFi Internet access that can support NUMBER simultaneous devices

We can rent furniture and equipment if needed and would be thrilled with any recommendations you have for suppliers.

Our event would be held on DATES, with attendees present from START until FINISH daily, and ideally staff access from EARLIER START until LATER FINISH daily.

In line with our inclusive practices for attendees, unless you already have a gender neutral restroom (i.e. may be used by people of any gender), we would like to designate and sign a gender neutral restroom for the duration of EVENT, to support trans/genderqueer/nonbinary attendees. We are happy to discuss which room this will be: it could be a single-stall restroom or a [women’s|men’s] restroom. It would be marked as gender neutral for the duration of EVENT.

Your staff at our event

We’d love to have your employees or community members attend EVENT. We will tell you where they can apply to attend the event when applications open!

We welcome the support of your venue staff (eg liaison, security), but ask that they do not join EVENT sessions unless they were accepted as an attendee. We ask that all your venue staff who will be in our location adhere to our anti-harassment and other event policies (which we will supply to you in advance).

As EVENT is an invitation-only event, we need the EVENT spaces to be limited to attendees and event staff, and not be used by any of your employees working on other tasks. People not attending or working on EVENT also should not travel through the EVENT space. However, we don’t need exclusive use of an entire building or office; simply clearly delineated space.

We ask that you not treat EVENT as a recruiting event, with one exception: some sponsorship packages include access to contact details for attendees who wish to be contacted about job opportunities and we are most happy to discuss these packages with you!

Our attendees strongly value their privacy, and we ask that our event and its attendees not be photographed or recorded by any of your staff without arranging this with us in advance.

Sponsorship benefits

Please see our current sponsorship prospectus for the benefits we offer to sponsors this year. As a venue sponsor, you will usually receive a mutually agreed sponsorship package from the prospectus. If you have any questions or wish to discuss a custom package, we would be happy to talk with you!

Contact

Please contact EMAIL at any time if you have questions or concerns.