Sponsor OFU 2026

Online Facilitation Unconference · November 5–7, 2026 · Online, worldwide

Draft v0.8 · published as a working draft

The short version

This is written for companies who build for the online facilitation community — the tool makers, the platform teams, the training providers, the consultancies whose customers spend their working lives running rooms. It covers how to be part of OFU 2026, and what sponsoring it involves.

OFU is the annual gathering of people who facilitate online. Not a trade show. Not a webinar series with a sponsor slide. A participant-driven exchange where the agenda is proposed and hosted by the people in the room, in true unconference style.

First, come. Register, and send one or more of your subject-matter experts — whoever in your company knows what this craft involves (process, design, engineering, etc.). That is the ask we care most about. With a good number of you in the room, comparing notes with the people who rely on the technology every week, the event will be better for everyone in it. You included.

Then, if you want to back it: sponsor. $250, $500 or $1,000. It keeps the event open to people who could not otherwise afford to be here, and it puts your name where this community can see it. Team seats come with it, so the first ask is covered too.

What you risk: $100. The balance is invoiced after the event, once the follow-up report is out, and if we did not deliver what we promised, you don’t need to pay (just make sure to share your feedback). No negotiation, no argument. We can offer that because every benefit is logged with evidence as it happens.

Why this is worth your time

Facilitators are the people who decide which tools a room of forty people will use on Tuesday. They are practitioners, not procurement — they try things, and they tell each other what worked.

Nobody enjoys being marketed at, and at an unconference nobody has to sit through it: the Law of Two Feet means a session that turns into a pitch simply empties out. So the rule below is less a moral position than a description of what the format does anyway.

The no-pitch rule

Sponsors do not pitch where people did not come for a pitch. Not in an unconference session, not in the chat. Those are practice conversations, and a demo in one lands badly.

If we run a short-format tool track, it will be labeled as exactly that, and the people who want it will choose it. Nobody should have to sit through a product walkthrough they did not opt into — that is the whole of the rule.

Your people come as practitioners. They propose and participate in sessions the same way everyone else does, and those sessions stand or fall on whether people want to be in them. They answer questions about their craft. They compare notes on what actually works when 250 people are dot-voting at once via video conference. They learn something.

We think that is a feature. It is why your best people will enjoy coming, and why the room will listen to them when they do.

If the traditional booth and a lead list is what you need, we may not be the best fit.

What we are asking for

Three things we care about, and then the money.

1. Send your experts, not your sellers. Your community lead. Your head of customer education. The person who runs your facilitator program. The engineer with strong opinions about how sticky notes should behave when a group is trying to cluster them in a hybrid meeting. Whoever in your company knows and cares about these things.

2. Contribute something. Propose a session. Host a conversation. Bring a hard question you have not solved. Anything from a 5-minute lightning talk to simply showing up and being useful in someone else’s session. Most of OFU is conversation rather than presentation, so this is a lower bar than it sounds.

3. Share it with your people. Most of you already have a facilitator community — a user group, a certified-trainer network, a Slack, a newsletter segment. We will give you a discount code that is yours to pass on. What you are offering them is a couple of days with peers from around the world doing the same work, and the chance to learn from them and forge new connections. In our book, that’s a nice thing to be able to give your community, and your name is on it.

That third one is the single most valuable thing a sponsor can do for us, and it costs you a couple of emails or forum posts.

And then the money. It covers what the event costs to run, and it is what lets us keep saying yes to everyone. With our “geo fairness” discount, anyone can take 25%, 50% or 75% off an OFU ticket (even on top of the 30% partner/sponsor discount) — no questions, no paperwork, no means test. That discount comes straight out of what the event takes in. We do not turn people away over price, and sponsorship is a large part of how that stays true.

The event

First initiated in 2013 by Tim Bonnemann and run by a group of inspired volunteer practitioners. Since 2017, OFU has been hosted by the Center for Applied Community Engagement LLC. The event has been run on a cost-recovery basis — it covers what it costs to run, and that is the whole of it.

Who comes: independent facilitators and consultants · public participation and community engagement practitioners · L&D and organizational development teams · trainers and learning designers · community managers · agile coaches and change management practitioners · activists · leaders · change makers

Where they came from in 2025:

The three levels

Every level includes the no-pitch rule, the satisfaction guarantee, a place in the goodie bag, and an open invitation to contribute. What changes is how deep your involvement goes.

Supporter — $250

For companies who want to back the event and be visible to the community.

• Logo on the OFU homepage and in the event program
• 2 team seats
• A discount code for your community, tracked so you get credit for who comes through it
• One offer in the virtual goodie bag — see below
• Named in the closing thank-you
• Your logo, blurb and link in the post-event report
• The record of everything we delivered, sent with your invoice
• Your experts are welcome to propose sessions, like anyone else

Collaborator — $500

For companies who want their people visibly present.

Everything in Supporter, with 4 team seats rather than 2 and your logo placed above the Supporter level — plus:

• A dedicated mention in one edition of the newsletter to our subscriber list
• A dedicated post across our social channels
• Early access to the post-event report
• A quote from one of your people in it — a photo, name and title, and a few paragraphs on what they saw. Not a testimonial about us: what they learned, what surprised them, what they are taking back to work

Anchor — $1,000 · limited to 4

For companies who want to be in it rather than on it — giving a short talk, putting a question to the room, and being the first name people see.

Everything in Collaborator, with 8 team seats rather than 4 and top position on the homepage — plus:

• A 5-minute lightning talk in the pre-event program, for one of your experts — on a facilitation topic, not a product topic. Happy to help you shape it so it’s more likely to land.
• Ask the room a question. We survey participants immediately after the event, and you get one question in it — credited to you, about facilitation practice rather than your product. We share results openly by default. That is the shape of it: not private market research, but a question with your name on it, put to people who have just spent two days thinking hard about this work.
• First refusal on the same level for 2027

The virtual goodie bag

Every partner and sponsor may put one offer in front of everyone who registers: a free month, a template pack, a course seat, an open workshop — whatever is genuinely useful to a facilitator. A short title, a paragraph or two, and a link.

Two things worth knowing. We read every offer before it goes up, like any other collateral. And attendees go to you directly — we do not pass on anyone’s details, so if someone wants what you are offering, they sign up with you, on your terms.

Homepage placement is by level — Anchors above Collaborators above Supporters. Within a level, logos are shown in no particular order. There are four Anchor places and we do not intend to add more.

How it works

1. Say yes — email hello@ofuexchange.net and tell us which level. A person replies. Sponsor sign-up opens in August, happy to chat beforehand.
2. $100 deposit — we send a payment link; that is all that moves until after the event.
3. The rest happens in your portal. Sign in with the same email address — no password, we send you a link — and everything is in one place: upload your logo, write your goodie-bag offer, copy your discount codes, see your team seats and how many people have registered through you. Your codes and seats are issued for you; the logo and the offer go into a short review queue, because nothing appears on the site unannounced.
4. Show up. Bring your people and take part.
5. Afterwards, in this order: the survey opens the Monday immediately after the event and closes about a week later. The follow-up report is finalized with the survey results in it and goes out after that. Your invoice travels with it, alongside the record of everything we delivered and your survey results if you are an Anchor. So the evidence and the ask arrive together, and if we fell short, tell us and disregard the invoice.

Questions we expect

Can we run a product demo session? Not as a regular unconference session — those are practice conversations, and a pitch in one lands badly with this audience. You can absolutely run a session on a real facilitation problem your product exists to solve, and say what you build when someone asks.

Separately, we are considering a short-format track: 15- or 20-minute slots where a sponsor shows how a tool actually works and how it plays out in a real group process. People do ask for this — they hear a tool mentioned in a session and want a proper look at it. The details are still being worked out, so treat it as something we are exploring rather than something included. If it happens, sponsors hear first.

What if nobody comes to our session? Open Space, which the unconference format grew out of, has a principle for exactly this: whoever comes is the right people. It is not a consolation prize — it is the working assumption. The people in your session chose it over everything else running at that hour, which is a stronger signal than a full room ever gives you, and three of them is often the better conversation.

The companion Law of Two Feet is why that holds: people move to where they can learn or contribute, so the room you end up with has selected itself. Nobody takes offense at either end of it.

Happy to help if you want a second opinion — we have run this before and we know what this room turns up for.

We are a small company. Is $250 worth it? The Supporter level exists precisely for small teams. Two seats at the door, a code your whole community can use, your logo on the site, an offer in the goodie bag and a place in the follow-up report — and the code costs you nothing to pass on. Several of our most useful sponsors will be companies of under ten people.

What can we ask in the post-event survey? One question about facilitation practice — what people struggle with, how they run something, what they wish existed. Not brand awareness, not product preference, not “have you heard of us.” We are happy to work on the wording with you so your question earns its place — and a good practice question tends to get better answers than a brand one anyway.

Who sees the answers? We share results openly by default, maybe even as they come in. Individual responses always stay with us; you see the aggregate. Write a question you would be happy to ask out loud in the room — which is straightforward if it is about the craft rather than about your product. If what you need is confidential research, this particular survey probably isn’t the right instrument. We’re happy to discuss future opportunities, though.

Can we get attendee contact details? No — we never share or sell a list. If an attendee wants what you are offering via the virtual goodie bag, they follow your link and sign up with you directly, on your terms. You get your code’s registration count; you never get a list from us.

What goes in the goodie bag, and what does it cost? One offer, at every level, included. Something a facilitator would actually use — not a brochure. We will tell you honestly if we think an offer will land badly with this audience, which is the same service we offer on session proposals.

Who else is sponsoring? Ask us — we will tell you honestly where we are.

At a glance

Every row is logged with evidence as it is delivered, and the report you get after the event is generated from that log rather than written by hand. It is the same list we work from, which is why we can afford to let you decide whether we earned the balance.

The no-pitch rule, the satisfaction guarantee and an open invitation to propose sessions come with every level, and are not in the table because they are not benefits — they are how the event works.

Talk to us

hello@ofuexchange.net

Changelog

We publish this while details are still being settled, so here is what has changed since it went up. Nothing on this page ever shrinks: what you are promised when you sign is recorded then, and additions reach everyone already at that level.

• v0.8 (Aug 14) — first published draft.