We’ve never really talked publicly about how we do sponsorship at XOXO.

You know how event sponsorship usually works: event organizers sell the attention of their attendees, plastering corporate logos all over program materials, the venue, and stage. They work their way into the programming with sponsored talks and booths, branded swag plied onto attendees during registration, and, too often, the free sharing of attendee information and contact details for marketing purposes.

We’ve committed to never do that kind of thing at XOXO.

Instead, we built up a community of patrons — like-minded companies that would contribute to make the festival better in meaningful ways. In previous years, our patrons have supported the cost of offering free childcare, live captioning, non-alcoholic drink options, accessible transportation, and increasingly, subsidize the cost of passes for attendees.

This year, we’re grateful to MailChimp, Intel, Intercom, and Figma for contributing to make XOXO more welcoming and inclusive for everyone.

In exchange, we invited our patrons to bring some of their team to XOXO, and credited them on stage and throughout the festival for their contributions. Every year, the feedback we heard was that this was far more meaningful and impactful than swag bags or sponsored talks.

Subsidized Passes

In the past, we’ve found that the most impactful thing to make XOXO more inclusive is to provide passes for free to those who couldn’t afford to go otherwise.

As a result, this year, we gave out more than  20% of our 2,000 passes for free to people who requested them during registration. This was over 400 passes , more people than attended in our entire first year of the festival in 2012!

We were committed to giving out these passes, whether or not we could find enough patrons to cover those costs. We grew the festival this year, in large part, to help make that effort possible. Making the event accessible to hundreds of indie artists and creators is incredibly important to us, and seeing everyone it’s brought in, we know it was the right choice.

How You Can Help

As you might imagine, it’s hard to find companies willing to make the leap into nontraditional sponsorship. So, for the first time, we find ourselves looking for companies big and small willing to help offset those costs.

We’re calling it Community Patronage — a way to help more people attend the festival who couldn’t afford to go otherwise.

If you want to help cover the costs of one or two passes for others, we’re hugely grateful to you for the contribution, and we’ll list you on our site as a Community Patron with a link to you or your work.

If you can cover the cost of five passes with a $2,500 contribution, we’ll give you a complimentary XOXO pass and credit on stage at the festival and on our site. If you’re able to cover the cost of at least 10 subsidized passes with a $5,000 or higher contribution, we’ll add in a second pass for a guest.

If you’re interested in making a larger contribution as a Company Patron, we’ll work with you to bring more of your team to the festival and collaborate on a project to make the event better, and credit you for that effort on stage to our over 2,000 attendees, speakers, and performers.

If you’re interested, drop us a line at [email protected]. Thank you!