In-kind

Sponsorship paid in goods or services rather than cash. A cafe covering the venue and the coffee, a rental house lending a camera package, a printer producing your signage. It is real money, it just gets spent on your behalf instead of landing in your account, so it belongs on the prospectus as a named tier with named benefits and a value attached to it, usually whatever that line would have cost you in the budget. The common mistake is treating in-kind support as a favor and thanking it informally. That costs you twice: the sponsor never gets the recognition they earned, and your budget never shows what the event actually takes to produce.

Source: The DevOpsDays organizing guide’s Host tier is the clearest published version: “if a company sponsors the venue/food they will be acknowledged as a Host sponsor,” with their logo on the main event page, the option to run a promoted pre or post event meetup, and the same benefits as the top cash tiers (devopsdays.org/organizing). The same guide notes a practical caution worth carrying: venue sponsors, especially if you are in their building, may try to set limits on your other sponsors, so clarify that in writing ahead of time.

First used in: 1.5 · Sponsorship I: the package. Revisited when the venue itself is a sponsor in 1.6 · The venue: selection to BEO.