One of the topics I forgot to mention from the Roundtable was a swell of dissatisfaction with the GAP. Not all understood it, and it’s clearly not “global” from the perspective of the non North American events. I don’t know if GAP is a good idea or not, but it started to help sponsors (and PASS) look at marketing overall. Here’s an example. Imagine you’re a vendor in our space. You’re going to get at least 2, and probably more, emails from each event asking you to sponsor. They all have similar but different sponorship plans. With 120+ events a year, how you do you manage that effectively?

One way is to give PASS a big check and have them distribute it to the events you pick. You still have to send SWAG, coordinate a speaker, send tweets and emails, but it’s a one time check to write and probably easier to manage. Not dumb to wish for easier, and kudos to PASS for trying to solve the problem at multiple levels.

I don’t think GAP should go away, but it needs to evolve. I don’t know if we can “make” sponsors allocate some of those funds to non North American events. Certainly we could encourage them – maybe even offer some dollar matching for those cases. Maybe we should just rename it!