Great target audience and conference type, @Axia ! We agree with @ChronoTrigger that we first need to have an events strategy (and objective) of what we’re trying to do. Then a budget is identified to execute on that strategy. I.e. we have to understand what we want to accomplish first before we create a budget vs. we’ve got x RIF to spend and here’s what events we want to participate in (the mistake that we believe other DAOs (like Arbitrum discovered with their events fund).
As a delegate that has 20+ years experience running events and conferences, we can tell you that sponsorships are usually very “vanilla” in terms of ROI for the sponsor - i.e. not a lot of “bang for your buck” unless, we create a very specfic goal (and we support the others comments here about participating in Builder Day), which we believe will have the most impact for Rootstock.
If we want to do this right and get the most out of an events strategy, then we need to identify what are our specific goals. Here are some starting discussion ideas:
- New grant applicants (from the Builder Day event) - general grants ideas created by grantee (i.e. increase the number of grants by x% from event).
- New grant applications (from Builder Day event) - but grants are specific to a RT identified strategic geo location, defi or trafi bridge focus - This goal would align to your comments regarding strategic goals and expansion of delegate participation. Almost like a pilot program to build and strengthen a RT ecosystem growth objective.
- Branding growth - this could be a sub-goal created by delegates at the event to promote specific RT events (Builder Day micro grant awards).
It may be early in the discussion, however, one of the ways we could advance these discussions while in parallel with this forum thread, is to spin up a short term (<30 day) working group of interested delegates to engage with all the delegates (proactive outreach and/or open office hours) to do some research of event opportunities, work with the RTLabs team regarding ecosystem priorities (DAO priorities vs. Labs priorities may be slightly different) and make some recommendations to the greater delegate community. We would be willing to contribute to this project.