DjangoCon Europe: Why do we sponsor?

In early June the Foxley team will be heading to Vigo in Northern Spain for DjangoCon Europe. We are really looking forward to our Spanish adventure and meeting up with our friends from the Django community.

This will be our 4th DjangoCon in a little over 18 months having attended and sponsored the conferences in Porto (September 2022), Edinburgh (June 2023) and DjangoCon US in Durham, NC (October 2023) check out our instagram where there are some highlights videos.

In this blog post I wanted to share a bit about why we attend and sponsor DjangoCon events, how we measure if it has been a “success” and how we budget for the cost.

I would 100% recommend you look into sponsoring a DjangoCon and how doing this can benefit your business.

At Foxley Talent, we talk all the time about being the go-to recruiter for the Django Community. This is one of those “destination targets” that are very difficult to know when it has been reached. What we can do along the way is plot our journey and ensure that we are doing our utmost to stay on track!

Attending conferences and meetups is one of our favourite activities as we get to meet lots of great people. We find that we build relationships on a different level here than a transactional job search recruiter would. We get to know people when they don’t need us and in turn when things change they are confident that we can help navigate a search when they do.

In a previous job, whenever I wanted to spend money on event sponsorship I was questioned as to what the ROI (return on investment) would be. This was never as easy as saying “I’ll meet a jobseeker who I will place” or “I’ll meet a new hiring manager” because you never know what will happen.

Now with running the business, I do have to consider things like the ROI for sponsoring an event like DjangoCon Europe as it’s not just the expense of the sponsorship itself but also travel and accommodation costs for our team as well as food, drinks and other costs while we are there. It’s also the swag, the stickers, leaflets, additional baggage costs, all sorts.

Being totally open about the numbers, we’ll have spent over €10,000 before we land in Spain. This is a cost that we budget for along with the US leg of our DjangoCon World tour. As a small business this is a lot of money to spend.

As far as I see it, if we are going to reach our goal, we need to be ever present at the conferences in the regions we work within. We need to support the community and these conferences that are put on can’t run without sponsors.

Sponsoring DjangoCon Europe, DjangoCon US and donating 5% of our profits to the Django Software Foundation are budgeted as non-negotiable spends in our annual budget. We do this to both support the community and to generate new revenue.

We don’t set any targets when we attend a DjangoCon to collect data or to book sales calls afterwards. We want our interactions to be genuine, not forced. We chat to everyone who comes to our stand, we talk to people between conference talks, during the meal breaks and in the evenings. Some people we already know, others we meet for the first time.

In a recent business review we identified that around 25% of candidates placed into new jobs in the last year can be linked back to an initial conversation held at a DjangoCon somewhere in the world. This data shows us that our approach is working.

See you in Vigo, or if you want to get in touch before then please feel free to reach out.