Create Tiered Sponsorship Structure and Content About Donation Process

[brandonhudson]

Problem

We've been taking on a lot of sponsors to the public site in recent weeks and in doing so, the page is getting fairly long. Currently, we don't have any sort of ordering methodology - we just haphazardly order in a semi-cronological ordering with a few exceptions (RIT, AT&T, etc.). This leads to donors who have given more in recent years potentially being recognized toward the bottom of the page.

Solution

• Develop a tiered donation structure where we take account of the monetary value of each donation (even if it comes in hardware/software/license form) and pool the donors into 3 groups according to what they've donated:
  • Platinum: This is the highest possible group and is there for large donors
  • Gold: This is for our medium donors
  • Silver: This is for donors that give one-offs or smaller donations. We still want to give them a group that sounds appealing so they know they're being recognized.
• Only show Platinum/Gold donors in the rotating collection on the homepage.
• We decide on the monetary value ranges for each of these groups based on our knowledge of donation values over the past few years.
• We change the public site sponsors page to order these groups in three sections, with Platinum at the top of the page (rough concept):
  
• We move the Sponsors page to it's own dedicated tab as a dropdown. We keep the current page, and also add a page about how to donate and the donation tiers.
  • The 'how to donate' page should express what we do with the funds (projects, equipment, etc.), explain RIT's donation process, and the tax-deducibility of donations (i.e. that we operate as a non-profit)
• We inform companies that visit about our ability to take donations and why it is great to benefit the organization.

cc @mbillow @com6056

This is an enhancement of #43.

[mbillow]

So, I think this is something that we should definitely do. It isn't going to be as simple as you might think though. From a financial perspective, we get donations ranging from a couple hundred to a couple thousand on and off every month. (The larger ones are obviously less frequent.) Asking the financial director to manually edit HTML every month, keeping track of exact donations, bumping recent donations, etc. is a lot of work that I see getting ignored very easily. Also, some of those donations are by people who might not want their name published, so you are also adding the responsibility to someone's job (probably Financial) to contact donors and ask if they want their donation to be public. We could only do corporate donations, but that seems unfair since a lot of that money is from corporate match programs.

So, should his happen? Absolutely. Is it going to be simple? No.

Maybe we should look into building a simple donation tracking service and expose some kind of API... just a thought. Asking one person to do all of that seems like a bad idea.

[brandonhudson]

I'm not proposing that Financial be the only one doing this. I think that financial should be tracking who donates what to us (in item/value form), because that seems like the perfect fit (and should already be happening if we're not doing that already). As far as adding sponsors, it's as easy as opening an issue like we currently do and saying "Add [COMPANY_NAME] to the sponsors page in [GROUP]" - we have enough webmasters/contributors to be able to do that adequately.

As far as tiers, I think we should look at them on a lifetime donation basis, as opposed to rolling monthly changes. Once a company gets above a tier, we move them. If there comes a point where we see too many people getting to Platinum, we adjust the tiers (we can worry about this when/if we get there).

From the technical side, we can take the current JS for adding sponsors to the homepage and beef it up a little to add the tier information. Then we adjust the Sponsors page to render the sponsors in their tiers based on the sponsor objects in JS. Doing so will make adding a sponsor and moving their tier down the road a trivial technical process.

As far as an API/tracking service, I think that's a little overkill for the initial implementation - let's make the Sponsors page render based on the JS and use a google spreadsheet for tracking donations.

When a company donates, we let them know that we will feature them on our website for others to view and use their current logo from their website or press kit. We make this an explicit opt-out process, not featuring companies who reach out saying they do not want to be featured. We can add this information to a field on the spreadsheet so it carries forward to additional donations from them.

This structure is focusing/applying to our corporate sponsors/donors only - we keep the same free-flowing acceptance from alumni/others who donate in an individual capacity.