Proposal: Update sponsorship request requirements on plone.org

Communications Team
1

Hi everyone,

I am posting this as a lightweight Plone Proposal for community input. The Marketing Team would like to update three pages on plone.org that cover event and marketing sponsorship requests. The changes were drafted by Astrid Beyers as part of the Marketing Team's ongoing work to align the sponsorship policy with current practice.

What is being proposed

Three pages are affected:

  1. Event and Sprint Sponsorship Policy (main policy page)

  2. Marketing Event Sponsorship Details

  3. Event Sponsorship Request (form page)

Summary of changes

House style fixes throughout: "Marketing Team" and "Foundation Board" are now consistently capitalised as proper nouns. These are small but important for a professional-looking site.

Substantive changes:

  • The report-back requirement now explicitly asks event attendees to publish a News item on plone.org (in addition to filling the Sponsorship Report Form). Previously this requirement existed but was inconsistently worded across pages.
  • Reimbursement is now explicitly gated on the News item being submitted, not just the report form.
  • Photos can now be sent to the Marketing Team for upload to the Plone Flickr account (new addition).
  • The form page title is fixed: "Event Sprint Sponsorship Request" → "Event Sponsorship Request" (sprints already have their own separate form).

Why this matters

The sponsorship pages are one of the first places community members land when they want to represent Plone at an event. Inconsistent capitalisation and ambiguous requirements create confusion and extra back-and-forth. The News item requirement has always been part of the expectation; making it explicit prevents misunderstandings at reimbursement time.

Discussion

Please share any concerns, questions, or alternative wording suggestions in this thread.

Discussion window: 2 weeks — closing approximately 2026-05-29.

After that, the Marketing Team will post a short decision summary and, if no material objections have been raised, apply the changes.

Thank you,
Alex Pilz / Marketing Team

3 Likes
2

Thanks for taking the lead on this important policy.

For Plone Event and Sprint Sponsorship Policy

  1. "report-back" s/b "report back"
  2. "You must also send the Foundation Board and Marketing team a report in the form of a News item on plone.org about the event." is a little awkward because the sponsored entity can't send an item on plone.org, and it doesn't say how to do so. I'd suggest "create a page content type under SOME_URL", and submit it for review to ENTITY.
  3. Flickr is capitalized.
  4. Determine whether to use American or British spelling. Documentation uses American.

For Marketing Event Sponsorship Details

  1. Indentation is doubled from original.
  2. "Event attendees" is not the correct entity as used throughout this page, but should be "Event organizers".

For Event Sprint Sponsorship Request

LGTM.

Thank you!

2 Likes
3

Thanks @stevepiercy ! well spotted on some of those inconsistencies :blush:

4

LGTM, but no diff reachable. Even with login.

5

Decision summary — 24.6.2026

There were a total of 42 days to give feedback.

(Delayed due to availability of stakeholders, not by discussions)

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this discussion.

Feedback received:

  • stevepiercy did a cross-read and suggested some corrections and minor enhancements
  • acsr approved the texts

Changes made to the proposal in response:

  • stevepiercy's changes were implemented by astridjuizi

Decision: (Accepted / Rejected / Extended)
Accepted

Decided by: Marketing Team Lead

Rationale:
The changes align the written policy with current practice. No material objections were raised during the discussion windows.

Next step: The three pages will be updated on plone.org. A brief decision record will be filed in the Marketing Team's governance folder.

1 Like
7

The summary of substantive changes looks great. The only tweak might be that submitting a news item is not sufficient. I can imagine someone at some point submitting a subpar news item and demanding reimbursement. You might want to give yourself some leeway to have the news item be in actual publication condition.

1 Like