We would like to use this money as an advance for the branding. We will also start a funding round, trying to collect the whole amount of money needed for creating the brand. In the best case we can “pay back” the whole advance of 5500€.
Draft for advertising funding round for creating the new branding
I would be happy to get some feedback on the following thoughts concerning funding for the branding.
As mentioned above:
I drafted a little text, that we can use to create an announcement to be send out via twitter:
Starting this year, we have been working hard to kickstart a branding for Neos. We have taken the first steps for creating a unique visual identity, that will make it easier for agencies to market Neos as a product, as well as strengthening the community and attracting new contributors.
For being able to finalize the branding, we need your financial support. We prepared TODO: on/two badges that you can buy at https://neosfunding.sandstorm.de. TODO Incentives Thank you so much for supporting Neos!
I am not quite sure about possible incentives that can easily be provided by us and I am not sure how this was handled in the past?
Possible ideas:
small badge “Branding Sponsor” → Put their name + link for 1 (or 1/2?) year in the branding section on neos.io
big badge “Premium Branding Sponsor” → Put their logo + link for 1 (or 1/2?) year in the branding section on neos.io
I think it’s an important incentive to make badge easy to sell, but it’s only available for company who publish package on Packagist (currently, will provide company profile for service provider, but not sure if that’s can be done for Inspiring)
During the design of the new site, we need to have a clear place on the home page to have some rotating badges.
@dfeyer: I was thinking about an extra incentive for the branding, like manually putting some information about the sponsors in section of neos.io explaining the branding. “Branding sponsored by”. After a period of time we just remove this information.
I like the idea of promoting these sponsors directly on the new www.neos.io front page for a limited time. I think we’ll need a sponsor-banner-section there anyway, in the long term at least. And I think that it’s definitely an incentive.
For me getting the funding visibility right will be a very important goal. I personally currently do not see this happening until InspiringCon, because there also needs to be some discussions about the general funding concept. How much are badges worth, why should somebody buying a branding badge should or shouldn’t have a higher visibility. Do we actually want/need extra branding badges.
So for the future, I guess we are on the same page For short term I need to draft an announcement, while the branding is still on the roll, so my questions remain:
should we have extra (short notice) branding badges, e.g. 500€, 1000€?
what is the incentive that we can can/want provide until InspiringCon (besides showing them in the general funding section on the front page sometime after InspiringCon)
would it be ok to not have any incentive for Inspiring Con and just for the concept and the integration of the funding plattform?
would it be ok to do that manually, e.g. put a “sponsored by …” in the branding section of Neos.io where you can download the new logo, font and colors and manually remove it later, without completely integrating the funding platform.
We could also not offer any special badges, but offer onetime badges bronze, silver, gold and direct the people to these?
In addition we could just show the sponsors in the funding presentation.
We should definitely offer to mention the sponsors during the presentation right before we present the new logo. That’s easy for us to do and valuable for the sponsors.
In general I like your ideas @fheinze - Though I think displaying the branding sponsors on the brand section could result in discussions, even though it would be only temporary.
For example lets say in future we have a badge for “Feature X” of Neos. Sponsors who’ve bought them could theoretically demand or question why they aren’t displayed on the feature site which explains “Feature X” once it is released the same as it was with the branding badges.
I would try to keep the presentation of the sponsors on the website fairly simple, just display the sponsors on one page and refer to that page wherever needed - Maybe it would be enough to append a button to the branding site which then refers to the overall sponsors list?
I also like the idea of @robert where we would promote the sponsors on conferences and such as we are presenting the feature. That should be a good selling point besides the presentation on the website and some buzz on twitter / facebook as soon as someone buys a badge.
TL;DR I’m bought, but I wouldn’t display the branding sponsors on the “content” page since it could result in discussions later on.
or a 
For short term I need to draft an announcement, while the branding is still on the roll, so my questions remain: