A quick guide to awesome tech conference sponsorship (by DevTernity Team)
DevTernity is a great place to hire a tech talent. Some companies are given this opportunity, but only few know how to use it effectively. In this practical guide, you’ll learn what makes a great sponsor and how to achieve remarkable results.
Take it seriously 💪
It’s important to take sponsorship seriously. Preparing to conference sponsorship is like managing a project. It requires time, creativity and resources. If you treat sponsorship frivolously, you’ll make no hires.
Start preparation early ⏳
Start preparing to the conference at least 3 months before the event. Ideally — after you signed the sponsorship agreement. Preparation at the last minute is stressful, risky and often leads to corners being cut.
Brainstorm 🧠
Schedule a kick-off meeting and involve people with different backgrounds — developers, HR, marketing. The more diverse people you involve — the better.
Want to hire developers? Involve developers. Want to hire QA engineers? Involve QA engineers. Want to make no hires and relax at the booth? Do everything alone.
Tell everybody you’ve become a conference sponsor and you’ll be setting up a booth. Now think how to make a great impression on conference attendees. You want to be noticed. You want to stand out. That’s your primary goal.
⚠️ The common fallacy about conference sponsorship is that you hire at the conference. Remember — you won’t hire developers at the conference. Your goal is to impress people, so they are happy to follow-up.
The golden question that facilitates communication:
Imagine we are conference visitors. What would impress us, so we are happy to follow up?
For effective and creative brainstorming, consider Disney Brainstorming Method.
Prepare booth wisely 🧐
The more interesting your booth is — the more people will hang out next to it. The ideal booth has the 3 main pillars:
1️⃣ An attention grabbing activity
Table tennis, hockey, xbox, VR — the choice is yours. The goal of the “attention grabber” is to bring more traffic to your booth.
2️⃣ A simple coding challenge
Next to your booth, actively distribute booklets with a simple coding challenge (and a pen). We — developers love coding challenges. It can also be an online challenge with leaderboard. Provide an appealing prize to winners. Ask your colleagues-developers what they’d like to win.
Participants should provide their full name, email address and a permission to receive a single email after the conference. Consent is generally a good practice and is required by law. If you don’t ask for consent explicitly, candidates will provide fake email. Alternatively, you can ask for a Twitter, GitHub or LinkedIn handle — developers share it easier.
3️⃣ The Dev Advocate
No, it’s not Devil’s Advocate. It’s Developer Advocate (further in text — DA). DA is a person who can enthusiastically talk to booth visitors. The topics include your company, product and job openings. The ideal DA speaks developer-friendly language, possess good technical and communication skills and can convince visitors to follow up and exchange contacts. Great DA uses the power of conference’s after-party, where developers are relaxed and are open for chat 🍻.
Prepare useful swag 🎒
Every participant is receiving a goodie bag or a swag bag. Sponsors have opportunity to drop an item in the bag. Dropping a useful item is the key.
What swag is useful? The answer is simple — useful swag survives the conference. It’s something that won’t get thrown into the bin immediately. For example:
- a bookstore discount code (e.g. safari books subscription)
- a nicely designed bookmark
- a laptop sticker
- a coding challenge
- a cool game
Useful swag can also be awesome 🎉. Awesome is something that people discuss over the coffee, share on Instagram and remember after the event.
The best illustration of useless swag is a boring advertising booklet 💩.
You can discuss swag during brainstorming. Remember to be creative, but practical.
Use the power of social media 📱
According to our analysis, sponsors who use the power of social media significantly outperform other companies. Many sponsors understand this, but don’t use social media anyway. This is why they make no hires.
What can you do? Just use a bit of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to let people know you’re attending the conference. Tell everybody you’re hiring. Tell everybody you’ll have a booth.
There are many good developers whose employers do not send them to conferences. Eager-to-learn developers will show thumbs up to your company 👍. This is exactly what you need.
You can go further and write a short post why you’re attending the conference. For example:
We’re attending DevTernity because it’s pure awesomeness. DevTernity covers practices and technologies we’re considering introducing to Shmotify — our killer app. Btw, we’re looking for a Senior half-stack Kotlin developer!
Many good developers work on boring products. Checkmate!
You can raffle a free ticket to DevTernity, invite people to your booth, or engage with the audience and ask — “we’re preparing cool prizes for you — DevTernity participant. What would you like to get?”.
As you can see, it’s possible to come up with many attention-grabbing ideas. Go and brainstorm with your team now!
Follow up! 👋
After the conference, it’s important to follow up with attendees who visited your booth. It can be an email, or a message on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Always remember to make it personal. We’ve seen many examples of mass messaging, where attendees receive a huge list of open job offerings. Like this:
Hello DevTernity participant! Thanks for visiting our booth. We’re looking for an officer manager, Java architect and Yoga instructor. If you are interested in, please find an .XLS spreadsheet with all open positions enclosed. Email us at company@nohires.last.year
Remember — personalisation is the key. You have to write a nice hand-crafted message. Because it takes time, some companies cut corners and do mass messaging. When your competitors are making mistakes, don’t interrupt them.
Call a person by name. Say you are excited about his/her experience at Shmoogle. Say you’d like to learn more about the person. Invite for a coffee. The rest is history.
Repeat after me — personal connection matters. If a candidate talked to your CTO at the booth, then CTO should write a message. Not HR.
FAQ
We tried sponsoring event X and didn’t make any hires
Surprise! Sponsorship does not automatically guarantee good hiring results. A conference provides face-to-face access to the best tech talent. It’s a tool that you have to master. Once mastered, sponsorship can become the most effective tool for meeting demanding hiring goals.
If you made no hires — retrospect, improve, retry. Our experience shows 3 key reasons why sponsorship fails:
- a vital aspect is missing (no right people, no activities, no follow ups)
- a company has nothing to offer to good specialists (basically, you suck)
- organisers are not involved during preparation
Remember, that we — organisers are here to help. Ask us for help!
Who should be present at the booth?
Make sure there is a technical person with well-developed communication skills. Letting people talk to your engineering manager or CTO is a good idea. Developers are looking for leaders they can learn from.
Developers also want to see their future colleagues. Make sure your developers stay at the booth between sessions.
Sometimes companies put a bored enterprise architect that does not want to talk to people. He is close to retirement. Hide him behind the cactus and let him rest. Make sure to expose positive and enthusiastic people! ☀️
All ideas are taken, but I want to be unique 🦄 . What should I do?
Sometimes sponsors come up with similar ideas and activities. This could be a problem, because you want to be unique. To avoid unpleasant surprises, always ask organisers if your idea is not taken by someone else.
This is another reason for starting preparation early. The earlier you start, the more cool activities will be yours.
In general, don’t be afraid of being not unique. Focus on being great 🚀.
Give us a mailing list of all conference participants!
Fortunately, it’s not possible. 2 reasons:
- 💩 it’s a bad idea
- 💩 it’s a very bad idea.
You can talk to people via Slack instead. At DevTernity, Slack is the primary communication channel for attendees, sponsors, speakers and organisers. Every sponsor has its own Slack channel. Unfortunately, not all sponsors are active enough. But you should be! For example, invite people to visit your booth for a raffle. Post a job offer and invite people to apply via a DM. This works extremely well, because some job seekers are too shy to visit booth directly.
You can also write a limited number of DMs to participants. But remember — with superpowers come responsibility. Use with caution.
We want to stay out of the crowd!
DevTernity offers different extras for boosting your exposure. For example, you can build your own branded quiet room, where developers hang out. Just look at this amazing room with separate WiFi and a mobile charging station:
But there is more. Ping us to learn more.
Should we build our own booth or use yours?
For maximum exposure, we recommend building your own custom booth. You can either bring equipment from your office or rent it. We provide location and power supply. The maximum booth size is limited in accordance to the sponsorship agreement. For example, this is a large 2x4 booth (available to Gold sponsors):
Looks amazing, isn’t it?
Alternatively, we offer a set of tables and chairs that you can use to build your simple, modest booth.
I have special booth requirements. What should I do?
Please inform conference organisers as soon as possible, so we can help make your wish come true. For example, if you have a special equipment that consumes a lot of electricity — let us know in advance and we’ll provide extra power. Have an extreme sport activity in mind? Let us know, we’ll agree on safety rules and no developer will die 😵. In Latvia, every developer counts.
Can I distribute food, snacks and drinks at my booth?
Absolutely! One of our sponsors have been successfully supplying conference attendees with coffee since 2015. Beware that alcohol is not permitted.
Will I know my booth location in advance?
Of course! We’ll let you know about your booth location at least 3 months before the event. In addition, you can visit the venue during standard working hours. The venue is Latvian National Library’s conference centre.
🏁 Final words
The first step to awesome sponsorship is writing us an email and asking for a sponsorship prospectus. Looking for devs? ➡️ sponsors@devternity.com.
