Going Solo

Going Solo Lausanne was my first experience ever dealing with sponsorships. And I can tell you, for somebody who is not (but not at all) a salesperson, it was a bit scary. Thankfully I had Lily to help me out.

One of the things I realised the first time around was that we didn’t have an offering which was really suitable for startups or companies with really small budgets. So, for Going Solo Leeds, we added a £250 package which was specially designed for startups or micro-companies who want to be present at Going Solo but might not be able to afford a full sponsorship package (they range from £1,250 to £4,000 — but before deciding that’s a lot, check what’s in them ;-)).

Here’s what the micro-sponsorship package offers you for £250:

• Logo on Going Solo Website
• Logo slide in rolling slideshow presenting sponsors and partners on a screen in the lobby
• 2 special sponsor discounts for the event (30% off ticket price) or 1 minute presentation/video on screen in lobby (rolling)

One nice thing about the Old Broadcasting House, our venue, is that the lobby contains large display screens which we can make available to sponsors.

One of the screens will have a rotating slideshow of all the logos of our partners and sponsors (like we display them all on the website, in the sidebar and on the sponsors page). Some packages allow a customised slide rather than just a logo (check out the sponsorship offerings for details on that).

So, that’s what the second item in the micro-sponsorship offering is. As for the third, well, it’s a choice between two special discounts and a minute of screen time. But actually, it’s way more than a minute of screen time, because it will repeat throughout the day.

A second screen will be used to show a series of trailers, demos, screencasts, films or even slideshows (!), put back-to-back, and which will be on repeat all day. We plan on selling maximum approximately 30 minutes of screen-time total so that the number of repeats throughout the day and the lunch break is worth it. So, the micro-sponsorship offering gives a choice between two discounts or one minute of this screentime.

Screentime is also available as an “add-on” to any other sponsorship (£100 for the first minute, £50 per extra minute — max 5 min. per sponsor). Our offerings also include display tables (nicer than booths because you get more interaction with the attendees), podcast interviews and blog posts, the possibility to sponsor lunch or distribute goodies. Download the PDF detailing our packages and get in touch if you’d like to talk about them (we’re open to being creative, so if you have other ideas, we want to hear them).

• E-mail: sponsorships at going-solo dot net
• Phone: call Stephanie Booth on +41786254474 (GMT+1, CET)

Of course, I haven’t yet come to the meat if you’re a company thinking of becoming a Going Solo sponsor: the audience of the conference is very focused and engaged. We saw in Lausanne that all the people present were freelancers or thinking of becoming freelancers (and no one who just came to “browse” or check us out but were not really our target audience). As a result, there was a lot of interaction, a lot of personal engagement, and a great atmosphere. Everybody was really there to look for practical solutions to real issues.

So, Going Solo is really a unique occasion to contact such an audience. Anyway… There’s more information about all that in the PDF you’ve probably already downloaded ;-).

The event is in just over a month, so now’s the time to talk!

I discovered six groups a few days before Going Solo Lausanne, when Stowe created a channel for the conference. I’m happy to announce that they are sponsoring Going Solo Leeds and helping us get set up with their service, as it was pretty quickly obvious they were a really useful service for an event like ours.

If you already use Twitter (and you should!) you won’t have too much trouble understanding the utility of six groups. The Going Solo six groups livecommunity aggregates tweets from members of the community which are hashtagged #goingsolo. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can of course participate directly on the six groups site.

Six groups also provides code which allows us to display the latest message sent to the Going Solo Livestream, and gives easy access to the functionality:

So, in practice?

• register for a six groups account (you may use OpenID)
• join the Going Solo community
• edit your profile (add your Twitter ID in there so that @sixgroups can follow you!), add a photo, and look through community members to start adding friends
• adjust your Twitter settings so that your tweets are captured into the livestream
• for your tweet to appear in the livestream, use the #goingsolo (that’s a hashtag) somewhere in your tweet
• of course, the livestream is available through RSS.

And:

• you may also post a message directly from anywhere on the Going Solo websites, by using the six groups toolbar which appears at the top of each page
• if you enjoy being identified as something like “Gast88684”, you don’t even have to register! 😉

If you would like to add the Going Solo six groups bar to your site (and become a partnersite), all you need to do is copy the widget code into your template, just before </body>.

Looking forward to having you all take part in the livecommunity! Use the comments here for questions if you have any.

Quite a few bloggers have asked me for a referral code to use on their sites. I’ve also had requests for discount codes for those of you who want to promote the event to your community or mailing-list.

I’m happy to say that all this is now a possibility. Send me an e-mail (steph at going-solo.net) or a tweet (@goingsolo) to introduce yourself and your community. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

Promoting an event like Going Solo is a huge amount of work — often more than what you’d imagine (and more than what I imagined initially). That’s why everything the community does to help counts.

We don’t have a team of online marketers to get the word out there. It’s basically down to me, and of course to what all the kind people supporting Going Solo are willing to do.

I’m a blogger and a busy person, and so I know how easy it is to “want to do something” but not actually get around to doing it. Or how easy it is to think that what I can do won’t really make a difference.

So, I’ve tried to make it easy for you to “do something” to help get the word out about Going Solo Leeds (to your readers/network/community/friends) if you feel like it.

First, logos and blog badges which you can easily insert in a blog post or a sidebar by copy-pasting the code we provide, like these two for example:

<a href="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/" title="Going Solo Leeds Conference: 12th Sept."><img src="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/files/going-solo-leeds-logo-yellow-rectangle.gif" style="height: 75px; width: 150px;" alt="Going Solo Leeds logo." /></a>

<a href="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/" title="Going Solo Leeds Conference: 12th Sept."><img src="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/files/going-solo-leeds-badge-180x260.gif" style="height: 260px; width: 180px;" alt="Going Solo Leeds Badge." /></a>

(You can find others on the Promote Going Solo page.)

Second, the Going Solo Leeds home page provides you with the main information and links, as well as a brief description of the event if you’re looking for some stock text (we encourage you to speak in your own voice, of course, but sometimes it’s handy to know what the key points are).

Third, the videos and photos of the Lausanne conference are available (and embeddable — Flickr and DailyMotion) as illustration material. I guess this is particularly relevant if you were present in Lausanne and want to point out one of the highlights of your Going Solo experience to tempt others to follow in your steps.

Fourth, there are events on Upcoming and Facebook (as well as a Facebook group) to which you can invite your friends very easily (you certainly know how it works if you’re on one of those two services).

Fifth, if you’re into offline stuff, you can ask me (steph at going-solo dot net, or @stephtara on Twitter) to have a box of Going Solo MOO cards sent to you, or print out our posters and plaster them all over your neighbourhood:

And sixth, so that you don’t have to figure it all out for yourself, there are two links you can use to point people to registration:

• http://goingfar.expectnation.com/gsleeds08/public/register/order is the direct link
• http://leeds08.going-solo.net/registration provides some extra information.

While we’re at it:

• http://going-solo.net is the Going Solo blog
• http://leeds08.going-solo.net is the Going Solo Leeds website

Happy blogging, thanks in advance, and let us know if you don’t see your post appear in the coverage list soon!

Update 01.08.08: bloggers and community managers can now ask for their discount/referral code.

Enter the twisty roads of branding. Going Solo Lausanne ’08 was branded simply “Going Solo” (and a bit in a rush!) — so with the preparation of Going Solo Leeds ’08, I’ve been wondering how to deal with the website (I’m figuring it out, thankfully, as you can see if you start clicking around) and also, what to do about the logo.

Those of you who were already around at the time will remember that the badges and logo for Going Solo were whipped up in a bit of an emergency by the lovely and talented Stephanie Troeth, who in addition to being a precious advisor to Going Solo, also took part in the panel Solo in a Networked World in Lausanne.

I decided to keep the logo for the Leeds event (Steph tells me she wasn’t expecting it to stick around so long!) with a slight modification to indicate that it is not the Lausanne event anymore. Corinne Stoppelli (Exoconcept) came up with the Leeds stamp you can see below:

The logo also exists as a square, and on a white background. Sébastien Baudet kindly took over the rather ungratifying work of exporting the logo (and badges!) from Photoshop over and over again in various shapes and sizes. The “Promote Going Solo” page (lovingly put together by Virginie) will give you access to all the different versions, with handy copy-paste code so you can easily use this material on your site.

Oh yes, there’s a hint here. Now that you have shiny visual material close at hand, we’re expecting to see many a blog post!

As you probably know, Going Solo Leeds has a group on Facebook. The conference is of course present through an event page there. It has now also been published on Upcoming, so if you are staying away from Facebook, add it to your events!

On Upcoming:

• Going Solo Leeds on Upcoming

On Facebook:

• Going Solo Leeds Facebook event
• Going Solo Facebook group

Newsletter:

• Going Solo Leeds newsletter, if you prefer e-mail!

 

Wanted: sponsorship salesperson for Going Solo conference

Going Solo is looking for an enthusiastic salesperson to negotiate and finalise sponsorship deals. After a very successful first event in Lausanne, Switzerland, the conference is taking place again in Leeds, UK, on September 12th. There are plans to produce the event elsewhere in Europe and in the US.

Availability: as soon as possible
Remuneration: 20% commission on cash sponsorships
Profile: skilled in negotiating and closing sponsorship deals, knowledge of the tech/freelancing world a plus.

What we provide:

– leads (past sponsors and fresh contacts)
– sponsorship materials

What we expect:

– discuss and amend existing sponsorship offerings
– follow through to closure on provided leads
– other leads can also be explored freely.

If you’re interested or would like more information, get in touch with
Stephanie Booth (steph@going-solo.net, @stephtara, or steph-booth on
skype).

Cross-posted from CTTS.

I’m always glad to learn that Going Solo inspired others to put something together to help local freelancers learn from each other. Flying Solo (in addition to being a book on going solo which the authors kindly sent to me to read) is a one-day unconference for solo entrepreneurs and freelancers which is taking place in South Africa.

• Cape Town: Saturday 26 July 2008, 9.30am – 5pm at the Wild Fig restaurant, Observatory
• Johannesburg: Saturday 2 August 2008, 9.30am – 5pm, venue TBA

If you’re in that part of the world, visit the Flying Solo SA wiki and take part! There is also an online community on Ning.

Update: the link “sign up right away” was wrong and gave the impression registration was not open — actually, I messed up and posted the link to the Lausanne ’08 event registration (which is, obviously, closed). It’s corrected now, and you can really sign up right away 🙂

It took some time, but Going Solo Leeds (Sept. 12th) registration is open. Hop along to our partner Expectnation‘s site to sign up right away.

Here’s the deal:

• Early Bird (first 25 tickets — hurry up some have already been sold!): £150
• Normal: £220
• Late Bird (will kick in approx. 10 days before the conference date): £300
• On-site (if you really want to play it ‘last minute’): £350

A comment or two:

• for the Lausanne event, the first 25 tickets were sold in under a week
• there will be advanced seminars (3h workshops) on the Saturday morning — more about them shortly, but know already that if you have already registered for the main conference when they are announced, you will get a special discount on them (they will be open only to conference participants)
• Jet2.com is a low-cost company that flies to Leeds-Bradford International airport
• Leeds is 2.5h from London by train (book early, and you could pay as little as £22.50 return)
• the programme for the main conference is going to be very similar to the Lausanne one (don’t change a winning team) — videos are online for you to have a preview if you wish
• the Going Solo team is pretty excited about all this!

Looking forward to seeing you in Leeds 🙂

As you might notice, things are slowly moving on the website. The Going Solo blog is not moving, but the Lausanne ’08 site has been archived at http://lausanne08.going-solo.net and the Going Solo Leeds ’08 site is (still in the making) http://leeds08.going-solo.net.