I’d like to start by stating what’s never been the goal of our sponsorships:
- We’ve never done it for lead generation.
- We’ve never wanted a booth to show off our business cards. Actually, we didn’t have business cards for almost a decade! And now that we have them, we barely use them. 🤷♀️
- We never asked for, and now we don’t even accept attendees' contact lists.
We do sponsorships to give back.
Our community is what lets us exist. It’s thanks to them that we thrive. Of course you need to have a good product and an even better team. But without your community of users, that would be pointless. The least we can do is give back and support them.
We sponsor events and people we want to see succeed. We want to support others who are also helping rid the world of bad software. Through the years we’ve been able to increase the Balsamiq Sponsorship budget, so much so that in 2017 we hired a full-time colleague to take care of it. And soon after that, we officially made “Giving Back” Balsamiq’s fourth pillar, after Product, Company, and Teaching people about UI and UX.
As we say on our website, “Ever since we started in 2008, we made giving back a core part of who we are. We believe that doing good in the world is the right thing to do, regardless if it's good for business or not.”
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Balsamiq sponsorships in figures
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The first few years (2008-2011) of our sponsorships records are a bit foggy, but Peldi remembers clearly when people from Atlassian asked him to support the very first edition of their now well-known Summit in June 2009. It was Balsamiq’s first foray into being a conference sponsor and the company was not yet one year old! Actually it’s fair to say that Balsamiq as a company almost didn’t exist at the time, being Peldi alone. But he accepted gladly and thought of it as another chance to learn something new.
It was a “traditional” sponsorship: we had a booth, displayed some bottles of fine balsamic vinegar, and handed out leaflets with a handwritten style (very Balsamiq-y indeed!)
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From there, it just escalated:
- The first proper budget was set in 2012, when we spent almost $40,000 over a $50,000 budget.
- From 2013 our budget grew steadily until it reached $250,000 in 2017.
- But it still didn’t seem enough, considering that that same year we went over the budget. In 2017 we sponsored 146 events in 24 countries, 2 podcasts, 2 websites, a couple of organizations, and gave away some scholarships. So in 2018 we increased the annual budget from $250,000 to $350,000 for the next few years to this day.
- 2020 marked a sudden slowdown, because many events got canceled due to Covid. But 2021 looks very promising: we’ve spent more than $200,000 already!
If you want more details about the events, podcasts, websites, and publications we sponsor, take a look at our sponsorships of the last few years.
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How to add a sprinkle of creativity to your sponsorships
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Sponsorship packages are often very similar: your logo here, a leaflet there, a newsletter issue or a blog entry about your company, some free tickets… After a while, we asked ourselves how we can do the “usual things” in a different manner.
Here are some ideas and projects through which we tried to find a more creative way of sponsoring. I hope they can inspire you.
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Something you may do is donate the ad space on print media that sometimes comes with a sponsorship.
This is what we did in 2017, when we tried the new approach to our sponsorships for the first time. We were sponsoring Business of Software as usual — we love that conference! The organizers offered us some ad space in the program booklet, but here’s the truth: Business of Software is a small, tight-knit community. After all the talks that Peldi delivered through the years, almost everyone knew us already. So Peldi had the idea to give away our sponsorship space to people who were at the conference and might not have been able to afford to pay for advertising their companies.
We ended up donating our ad space and visibility to 8 new or smaller companies. We liked it; they liked it; the event organizers liked it. So we did it again in the following years:
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Benefits: It’s for sure something unexpected that people will probably notice more than a classic banner.
One of the problems with sponsorships is advertising blindness: if it’s the same old thing, most of them won’t notice it or read it. But you can try to get a different result by finding unusual ways to utilize what’s part of a sponsorship package and put it into good use — for your company and all the stakeholders involved. For sure Business of Software attendees got more intrigued by those new companies than they would have been if it was the usual Balsamiq company description.
In addition to that, the event organizers could help with collecting the info, leaving almost nothing for you to do.
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In our experience almost every type of sponsorship expects a certain level of content production from the sponsor, but it could be that you don’t have the time nor the resources to create new content.
You can always have generic descriptions and text to pass them but, let’s face it, that wouldn’t be very memorable. A more interesting idea is to donate your sponsored airtime, like what we did with some founder podcast sponsorships.
We sponsored 7 podcast shows for a total of 62 episodes over a year, and donated our sponsored airtime to other listeners and their companies. This is exactly the kind of Marketing we like the most: generous, innovative, low-touch, impactful. We loved it so much that we plan to do it again.
About the medium, we like to sponsor podcasts because they're an intimate way to reach highly focused audiences, and we especially like to help podcasters at their very beginning, because getting started is hard!
This is how we managed the project:
- We created a landing page on our website for each sponsored podcast, like the one we did for the Bootstrapped podcast.
- The landing page had 2 main elements: a form that we used to collect talking points or scripts from the listeners who applied, and a promo code for a 90-day free trial of Balsamiq Cloud that we offered to the podcaster’s community.
- Once we collected all the applications, we shared them with the host.
Benefits: This way of sponsoring meets one big constraint that many software companies' Marketing teams have: they are small teams. The Balsamiq’s Marketing team is composed of 4 people, none of us full-time on the team. Even creating the scripts for a podcast season can be hard for us.
In short, donating your airtime means you can still help podcast creators, but you don’t have to create all the content that’s needed. Yay!
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Create valuable content instead of the usual scripts
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In other cases, it could be that you really want to invest the time to create something unique and have all the resources available to do it!
Instead of producing scripts to be read by the host, which is a pretty common way to sponsor a podcast, you can make an extra effort and create a piece of content of value to their community.
It’s what we did with our sponsorship for Boagworld’s “Truly Lean UX” podcast season. We recorded short interviews of about 10 minutes each with the host and UX expert Paul Boag and one of our 3 educators in turn, that were then added at the end of the episodes.
Each interview was about one article from Balsamiq Wireframing Academy, often tied to the episode’s topic. For example, at the end of the episode about How to Become a Good UX Designer: A Beginners Guide you can listen to the interview with our design educator Billy presenting the page Advice for Getting Started in UX Design (at 50:30).
Benefits: By doing so, you focus on adding value to both the podcaster — Paul Boag was able to make it a free self-learning audio course thanks to our sponsorship — and their community — by providing content of value to them, in addition to the podcast episode itself.
Moreover, you could learn something about becoming a podcaster yourself and test your abilities! When we started this sponsorship in April 2020 we were considering doing our own educational podcast. We knew it would be a big commitment, but we had no personal experiences about it to refer to. So we used this project to understand if it’s something we’d like and would be able to do.
(The answer is yes!, we liked it and we can do it. But in the end the Education team decided not to start a podcast show for now and do webinars instead. And now we’re curious: what would you think about a Balsamiq podcast? Would you like the idea?)
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Raffle conference tickets
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Sometimes an event sponsorship comes with one or more free tickets for the sponsor. That’s a great chance for you to travel (or stay at home, if it’s a virtual conference 😉), learn something interesting, and meet new people.
But it could be that you or your colleagues won’t be able to attend. You can either leave the organizers the choice to assign your ticket to someone, or raffle it off to your community.
We raffled our tickets for years, but we’ve been slowly stopping doing it ourselves. The reason is because we end up with too many raffles to organize and manage: in 2019 only we gave away free tickets for 40 conferences! Even so, I think it’s a great way to add a little spice to your sponsorship efforts, especially if your volume is lower than ours.
We wrote a blog post about Balsamiq Raffles a few years ago, and it’s still valid in its detailed description of how we do it and the tools we use. Check it out if you want to know more about it.
Benefits: First of all, raffling off your tickets is a nice way to connect with your community. Winners will be thrilled, and most of the time they’ll share kind and enthusiastic messages and photos with you through emails or on social media. Trust me, it will warm your heart — and you’ll get nice testimonials!
Another great benefit is that you can use raffles to do a bit of User Research. When we collect the information from those who apply (the bare minimum information we need to communicate with them in case they win: name and email address), we ask them if they are Balsamiq users and if so, we throw in a couple of questions:
- What's the single most frustrating issue you encounter when you use Balsamiq?
- What’s the most important feature missing from Balsamiq?
Even if the answers are just a few, it’s another way for us to gather insights from our users. Sweet!
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Support underrepresented groups
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Every event or initiative needs help, but some communities struggle more than others. Supporting underserved communities means sponsoring conferences specifically designed to advance the careers of underrepresented groups in tech including POC, LGBTQ+ folk, marginalized genders, the disabled community, and more.
We considered doing this for the first time in 2020 and decided to allocate 50% of our annual sponsorship budget to support underserved communities in tech. We did the same for 2021, while right now we’re thinking about increasing it for the next year, maybe even up to 100%!
The support can come in the form of:
- Scholarship tickets for marginalized groups or people who cannot afford one
- Fees and travel expenses for diverse speakers
- Live-captioning and subtitling on-demand conference videos to increase the event accessibility.
Benefits: Our goal is to eradicate bad user interfaces as much as we can. “User friendly” is really a mission to us but to get to that, we have to ensure that all voices are being heard. There are groups in the tech and business industries that have historically been marginalized. If we want that to change we need to empower these groups and listen to what they have to say.
And even if there were no benefits to us, it’s just the right thing to do. 😊 Wouldn’t it be great if every community, however big or small, could speak up and express themself?
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What we get from sponsorships
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First of all, we give back. And that would be already enough for us.
But there’s so much more to it!
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One of our company values is “Always be Kaizening”, which means “continuous improvement”. We’re always eager to learn something new, and we’re big fans of doing things incrementally.
For example, the short interviews we did for Boagworld could be considered as a podcast test and taught us little important things about tone, microphones, impromptu speech… While thanks to donating sponsored airtime we improved how we work internally and how to approach the collaboration with podcast hosts.
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We innovate (and get recognition)
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Not being fans of advertising in general, we rely a great part of our Marketing on word of mouth, which we believe to be one of the most effective forms of Marketing.
All the creative ways to treat something “traditional” and (sometimes) “boring” as sponsorships bring us above the surface. And even if we don’t do big announcements about them, these initiatives get recognition. Which circles back to word of mouth.
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We honestly don’t know if we’ve been gaining new customers. You’re part of our inner circle, and you should know by now the strange disease called “metrics allergy” that affects all of us at Balsamiq to different degrees. 😉
But we’ve been expanding our network and making new friends for sure! We get to talk to a lot of people and we’re always struck by how many interesting, diverse, beautiful people there are out there! It’s one of our favorite feelings, and we’re grateful to be constantly reminded of it.
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- Podcasters and event organizers are happy, because they get the support they need.
- Their audiences are happy, because they get interesting or unusual content, or get to know new products and services, or can benefit from a greater event accessibility.
- Companies and start-ups that receive sponsored airtime or ad space on a leaflet are happy, because they get the exposure that they probably couldn’t afford otherwise.
- We are happy!, because in addition to helping all of them, we can test something that we’d like to try sooner or later, or we can avoid creating content and be simply an intermediary like for the podcast sponsorships.
In the end, it’s a win-win-win-… win! 😄
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Did we miss something important?
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Usually the Balsamiq newsletters end with a treat for you, our inner circle. This month I’d like to stretch that concept a bit and try to make you feel the joy we always feel when we can give practical support to our community.
Most of our sponsorship receivers come to us through the application form on our website. Sometimes we want to support someone so much that we contact them directly. In other cases we do the research, select, and reach out to potential receivers.
We know it’s a big world. We know that we don’t know all of it. Here’s where you might be able to help us and them.
Is there an event, or podcast, or YouTuber, or any other channel really, that you love and may benefit from our support? Ideally about our favorite topics: UI / UX, product management, software development, product design, bootstrapped companies, remote working… Let us know by replying to this email and we’ll consider them for a sponsorship. Plus, we’ll keep you posted about it 😊
Help us help them!
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Product news
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We’re working on a bunch of new exciting features, and some are starting to emerge. A small-but-exciting one from this month’s release is a new Quick Draw shortcut, for Images. Just hold down the i key and draw an image with your mouse. Super-quick!
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There’s lots more in the release, so check out the release notes!
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Wireframing Academy news
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- We published an article called “How to Use Wireframes for Content Modeling” that explains how a successful copywriter builds wireframes text-first. Helpful for anyone designing for the web.
- Our next webinar is right around the corner. Learn all about getting into User Experience as a Career on July 15th. More information and registration here.
- We made it easier to give us feedback on our education material and documentation. Each page now has a button at the bottom that says “Send Balsamiq feedback about this page...” You can tell us whether it was useful or not and add details if you want. We don’t require your email address (although you can provide it if you want a reply). Try it out!
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Our Founder & CEO Peldi guest-hosted the Bootstrapped.fm podcast for 5 episodes - he’ll tell you all about it in next month’s newsletter!
Help Us Grow the Balsamiq Research Program! We worked on our tools and processes so that we can interview more of you, and make it an enjoyable experience for everyone involved. We also offer a few nice thank you gifts options. Join today!
Sponsorships and raffles: notable events this month are Lesbians Who Tech Pride Summit, GirlCon, Hack for Pride, and more!
Notable recipients of our Free Software Program for this month are:
- Coeurious, who are creating a web app to allow retired people to share their most important life experiences with younger generations.
- Eron Powell, who is building a special free English language dictionary that makes it much faster for non-native students to understand how to use vocabulary.
- The Art of Kindness foundation, who’s building the world’s first sacred place for kindness.
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That's it for this month!
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Before I leave you, do you know or put into practice other creative, atypical ways to do sponsorships? We’d love to know! Just reply to this email. Thank you!
See you next month, with more behind-the-scenes news from your friends at Balsamiq!
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Francesca for the Balsamiq Team |
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