And there you go with the other reasons we don't have much sponsorship: Autonomy. We want to pay a rather substantial premium on our membership costs to avoid Big Bad Evil Corporate Sponsorship.
There was a fairly notorious case -- the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton -- where the convention accepted a lot of (badly needed) sponsorship from Bridge Publications. This led to a lot of bad feeling. When I was organizing Interaction's major events, we went after a bunch of sponsorship, but (for instance) we split what would have been the highest-profile sponsorship (two vertical banners hanging over the stage with the sponsor logos) into sixths, priced at GBP1000 each. Now that's less than USD2,000 each, and yet we had only one taker -- not enough to justify creating the banners in the first place.
People are somewhat afraid that we'd end up holding the L. RON HUBBARD WRITERS OF THE FUTURE hugo awards CEREMONY.
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Date: 2006-10-02 10:31 pm (UTC)There was a fairly notorious case -- the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton -- where the convention accepted a lot of (badly needed) sponsorship from Bridge Publications. This led to a lot of bad feeling. When I was organizing Interaction's major events, we went after a bunch of sponsorship, but (for instance) we split what would have been the highest-profile sponsorship (two vertical banners hanging over the stage with the sponsor logos) into sixths, priced at GBP1000 each. Now that's less than USD2,000 each, and yet we had only one taker -- not enough to justify creating the banners in the first place.
People are somewhat afraid that we'd end up holding the L. RON HUBBARD WRITERS OF THE FUTURE hugo awards CEREMONY.