BSides sponsorship is one of the cheapest ways for a security brand to be in a room with practitioners, and one of the easiest to waste. The events are volunteer run, the budgets are small, and the attendees have a finely tuned sense for a vendor that showed up only to scan badges. Here is what the money actually buys, and how to spend it so people remember you for the right reasons.
What does BSides sponsorship actually buy?
Mostly it buys the event existing. Local BSides conferences run on tight budgets, and sponsor money often covers the venue, the food, the speaker travel, and the badges. That is the honest answer to give your finance team: you are funding a community event, and the logo and the table are a thank you, not a media buy.
What you can reasonably expect in return is a logo on the site and signage, a table or a small booth, a few minutes of thanks from the organisers, and sometimes a lanyard or bag insert. Ask the organisers what past sponsors received before you commit. Do not assume a tier name means the same thing at two different events.
How do you pick the right BSides event?
Pick on audience fit, not on size. A small event full of the engineers who run your kind of product beats a large one full of people who will never touch it. Ask the organisers who attends: defenders, students, red teamers, managers. They usually know, and a good organiser will tell you plainly if your product is a poor fit.
- Check the track list. If the talks are about detection engineering and your product is a detection tool, the room is already interested.
- Check the organisers. Volunteers who answer email quickly and explain their rules are the ones who will run a fair event.
- Check the history. Read last year’s programme and sponsor list to see whether sponsors were treated as part of the community or as a revenue line.
What should a sponsor never ask for?
Never ask to control the programme, to review talks, or to place your own speaker in a slot you paid for. The reason the room is worth sitting in is that the talks were chosen on merit. The moment attendees suspect otherwise, the whole event loses the thing you came to be near. We make the same point for individual talks in our piece on sponsoring a security conference talk without buying its conclusions, and it applies even more to a whole event.
Also be careful with the attendee list. Many organisers will not share it, and they are right not to. Treat any contact you collect as opt-in only, handed over by the person in front of you.
How should your team behave at the booth?
Send engineers, not only sales staff. Practitioners walk up to a booth with a real question about a real problem, and they can tell within a sentence whether the person answering has ever used the product. A short, honest answer, including what your product does not do, earns more goodwill than a polished pitch.
Skip the lead scanner gimmicks and the prize draws that trade a contact for a trinket. If you want to give something away, make it useful: a small tool, a cheat sheet, a talk you gave. If you have a hands-on activity, a lab or a challenge, that is closer to what we describe in how to sponsor a security workshop without owning the curriculum.
How do you measure a BSides sponsorship?
Do not expect a clean attribution number. Measure what is realistic: the number of real conversations your team had, the follow ups people asked for, and any mentions in sales calls over the next quarter. Ask new prospects how they heard of you. The method is the same as the one we describe for CTF sponsorship, where the value is presence and goodwill more than a lead count.
A fair verdict after the event is often modest: we met some good people, we were not embarrassed, and a few of them will remember the name. That is a reasonable return on a small cheque, as long as nobody promised the board a pipeline.
Where do creators fit in?
Many of the speakers and attendees at these events are exactly the technical creators a brand wants to reach: researchers, bloggers, and people with a following of fellow practitioners. Sponsoring the event is a way to meet them without a transaction, and a later paid partnership is much easier when the first contact was a conversation rather than a pitch. If any of them cover your involvement afterwards, they should disclose any relationship, the same standard we apply to sponsoring a security Discord community.
Influous is pre-launch, and we are still building the marketplace. If you are a security creator who speaks at community events, you can apply to be vetted. If you are a brand planning a campaign around the conference season, you can start a conversation with us. Either way, you can reach us at info@influous.io.