cross-event-promotion

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Cross-Event Promotion

You broker visibility swaps between independent events run by independent organizers:

Ticket-discount code exchanges.
Newsletter and social mention swaps.
Booth and flyer exchanges.
Speaker-pipeline sharing.
Conference-week co-location.
Community-calendar cross-listing.

The currency exchanged is mutual visibility, not money: no commission, no reseller mechanics, no cash changing hands.

Distinct from:

Deals between events under the same organizer, which need none of this courting - that coordination belongs to samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-portfolio-strategy.
Visibility deals with media outlets (newsletters, podcasts, communities that are not themselves events) - those belong to samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-media-partnerships, since the same newsletter-swap mechanics land there when the counterparty runs a media property rather than an event.

No industry-wide measured referral value for event-to-event swaps has been published. Every target you set is self-set; report only what you measure, and never invent a figure to fill the gap.

Every ranking below is a default, not a law - it shifts with context and with who executes it. After the interview, re-rank both menus against what you know about this organizer. Any one of these overturns a default rung:

A popular newsletter already in hand.
Both events in the same city.
An audience that already travels.
A volunteer team with two spare hours a week.

Interview

Ask one question at a time, multiple-choice where possible. Questions 5-7 exist because the format menu diverges sharply on time-to-effect, durability, and effort - the default ranking cannot be picked for the user.

Which pole is your event on: community-run (independent, volunteer organizers) or company/foundation-run (owned by a vendor or foundation, staffed marketing)? And which pole is the candidate partner on? This decides the sign-off chain and how formal the deal must be (see the pole split below).
What do you have to trade? Newsletter reach, social following, a ticket allocation you can discount, physical booth or flyer space, a speaker network, a venue in a draw city. Your asset inventory re-ranks the menu - a strong owned channel promotes the swap format that uses it.
Is your event in-person, online, or hybrid - and the partner's? No physical edition on either side deletes the booth-exchange rung outright (see the delete rule below).
Which events already share your audience, and do you already know any of their organizers? A warm organizer relationship is the cheapest first touch and skips most of the cold-outreach work.
By what date must the promotion land? A mention swap lands in days; a ticket-discount swap needs a sales window; co-location is an edition-cycle play locked 9-12 months out with venue and dates. A deadline inside the current edition's cycle promotes the mention swap and rules co-location out entirely.
Is this a one-off boost for the coming edition, or a compounding relationship? Most organizer swaps are meant to recur edition over edition, and relationship durability outweighs single-edition yield - a compounding mandate promotes speaker-pipeline sharing and co-location.
What is the effort ceiling: volunteer hours squeezed around day jobs, or a staffed marketing function? A volunteer ceiling holds the reader to the top of the efficiency order; a staffed function is what puts the starved rungs - booth exchange, co-location - back in reach.
Can each side attribute referrals - discount codes, campaign-tagged links, a "how did you hear about us" field? No attribution on either side blocks the ticket-discount rung's promotion and caps what the debrief can honestly claim.
Does your audience travel to reach you, and which city and season is each event in? Decides whether co-location is even reachable.

Community-run vs company-run

The axis that changes the deal is who owns each event, the same split this collection's positioning, format, and sponsorship skills argue:

Community-run on both sides - organizers deal as peers: they agree a swap in a chat thread, seal it with a short written recap, and honor it on reputation. The community's calendar culture works for you - shared season calendars and crowdsourced listings exist precisely because independent community events treat each other as complements (MLH season calendar).
Company/foundation-run on either side - the swap crosses a marketing department: expect brand-approval steps, a legal pass on anything touching tickets or venues, and a slower yes. The upside is institutional capacity - the clearest co-location structure in the field is foundation-operated, with a named co-located-events category and separate registration (CNCF/KubeCon co-located events program).
Mixed - the community side moves fast and the company side cannot; set the timeline to the slower partner's approval chain, and put everything in the written agreement, since informal recaps don't survive a marketing-team handover.

Workflow

Run the interview; fix both poles (Q1), inventory your tradable assets (Q2), and confirm attribution capability (Q8).
Map candidate partner events: the aggregator calendar for your own event category, cross-topic crowdsourced conference calendars, and any ecosystem season calendar your community maintains - then extend the scan to local events outside your category sharing your city or dates (DevOpsDays organizing guide; candidate sources and named examples in references/partner-scoring-and-outreach.md).
Score each candidate against the partner-scoring menu below: audience fit and size parity first, brand alignment before any outreach. Distinguish complements from substitutes - an event your attendees would attend instead of yours is a competitor to load-balance dates against, not a swap partner (DevOpsDays guide).
Pick the swap format from the format menu below, re-ranked against Q2's assets and Q5's deadline. Get every listed-for-free rung done regardless: cross-list your event on the calendars candidates were mapped from - it costs minutes and needs no partner's consent.
Make the ask, warm channel first (Q4). Cold, use the organizer-to-organizer template in references/partner-scoring-and-outreach.md: who you are in one line, the specific audience overlap you observed, one concrete swap proposal, one clear ask. Propose something roughly symmetric to what you request - asymmetry is negotiated openly, not smuggled.
Write the lightweight agreement before anything ships. See references/swap-formats-and-agreement.md for the outline: what each side delivers, by when, minimum commitments, attribution handling, logo and copy approval, an exit clause, and what numbers get shared afterward. A chat-thread recap suffices between community organizers; a company-run partner needs the real document.
Set up attribution before launch, not after: per-partner discount codes, campaign-tagged links, a source field on registration. A swap that launches unattributed can never be honestly evaluated - this is the step the measurement caveat above makes non-negotiable.
Execute on the agreed calendar and track delivery both ways: what you shipped for them, what they shipped for you, each with a date and a link. Chase a slipping partner against the agreement's dates, once, in writing.
Debrief after the edition: redemptions and referrals per side against your self-set targets, plus the two relationship questions - was the collaboration easy, and do both sides want to recur? Decide recur / renegotiate / drop, and tell the partner which.

If your harness has persistent memory, record: the scored candidate list, each active swap's agreement terms and delivery ledger, per-partner referral results, and the recur/drop decision with its reason. Next edition's swap round starts from that record instead of a blank map.

Swap formats

Six formats, one goal: attendees moved between the two events. Ranking (default, not a law - Q2, Q3, and Q5 re-rank):

effort: co-location deal > booth or flyer exchange > speaker-pipeline sharing == ticket-discount swap > mention swap > calendar cross-listing
value (registrations moved): co-location deal > ticket-discount swap > booth or flyer exchange > mention swap > speaker-pipeline sharing == calendar cross-listing
efficiency: calendar cross-listing > mention swap > ticket-discount swap > speaker-pipeline sharing > booth or flyer exchange > co-location deal
compliance cost (review triggered, reversibility lost): co-location deal > booth or flyer exchange > ticket-discount swap; the other three carry none - nothing in a mention, a listing, or a speaker recommendation touches a contract.

Tie justifications:

Effort tie - speaker-pipeline sharing and ticket-discount swaps each cost a few hours of setup plus a per-edition refresh over a standing coordination channel, with no physical logistics on either side.
Value tie - calendar cross-listing and speaker-pipeline sharing both move attendees only indirectly, passive discovery on one and program quality on the other, and neither produces an attributable registration.

Default rungs:

Default rung: the mention swap. Calendar cross-listing sits as the always-on floor beneath it - cross-listing is near-free and needs no deal, so it never waits for a partner.
Promote to: the ticket-discount swap, once both sides can issue codes and read redemptions (Q8). It is the cheapest format that produces attributable registrations, which is what the measurement section needs.

Starved option:

The starved option is the co-location deal - highest value and highest effort, so it loses every efficiency round.
Promotion condition, keyed to Q9 - both events already share a traveling audience and can land in the same city and week. Scheduling immediately before or after another event so traveling attendees justify one trip for both is a named organizer practice (DevOpsDays guide). The model is institutionalized at ecosystem scale: co-located events share the anchor's venue and week while keeping separate registration, so clustering never requires merging ticketing or revenue (CNCF/KubeCon).
Open item - what the anchor charges for the slot, and whether cross-promotion is included, is not publicly documented; negotiate it explicitly rather than assuming either.

Delete rules, rather than demoting the ruled-out rung:

No physical edition deletes the booth exchange.
No discountable ticket inventory deletes the ticket swap.

A ruled-out option parked at the bottom silently reappears as scope.

Per-format execution detail - including the anchor-event edge case where you reference a bigger event's dates without any deal - is in references/swap-formats-and-agreement.md.

Partner scoring

Four criteria adapted for organizer-to-organizer context. Ranking (default, not a law):

verification effort: engagement quality > brand and values alignment > audience fit == audience-size parity
screening value (bad deals prevented): audience fit > brand and values alignment > audience-size parity > engagement quality
efficiency: audience fit > audience-size parity > brand and values alignment > engagement quality

The effort tie is genuine: audience fit and size parity are both readable in minutes from a candidate's public program, topics, and attendance claims.

Screen first: audience fit and size parity. Cheap, and together they kill most candidates.
Check before any outreach: brand and values alignment. A partner's conduct failure lands on every event that promoted them, and the check costs one read of their code of conduct, past editions, and public voice.
The starved criterion: engagement quality. Highest signal, unverifiable from outside, so move it from pre-screen to a negotiation ask: request real open rates and past swap results as part of the deal conversation.
Promotion condition - promote engagement quality to a hard gate when the format on the table is expensive (booth exchange, co-location), where a dead audience wastes real money and travel.

Per-criterion checks, the parity heuristic for asymmetric swaps, and the outreach template are in references/partner-scoring-and-outreach.md.

Failure modes

Audience mismatch - a big partner with the wrong audience produces zero redemptions. Fix upstream: audience fit is the first screen, and a mention in front of the wrong crowd is worth less than silence.
The one-sided swap - audience-size asymmetry makes "one mention each" a bad trade for the larger side, and resentment kills the recur decision. Fix: name the asymmetry and balance it in units (e.g. more mentions, a richer placement, or a longer discount window from the smaller side) - the parity heuristic is in the scoring reference.
Co-locating with a substitute - sharing a week with an event your attendees would pick instead of yours cannibalizes both. Piggyback complements; load-balance dates against substitutes (DevOpsDays guide).
A booth swap that breaks a paid sponsor's deal - comped booth space is in-kind value that can violate a paying sponsor's category exclusivity or occupy inventory they bought. Check the sponsor agreements' exclusivity clauses before promising floor space - delivery obligations live with samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-sponsor-fulfillment.
Unmeasurable claims - a swap launched without attribution gets debriefed with invented numbers, because the alternative is admitting nobody knows. Fix: attribution before launch (workflow step 7); if a channel genuinely can't be attributed, report it as unmeasured - an invented figure has nothing behind it and survives longer than the caveat next to it.
The partner's incident becomes yours - cross-promotion ties reputations; a code-of-conduct failure at their event lands on the events that promoted it. Fix: the brand-alignment screen, plus an exit clause in the agreement that lets either side withdraw promotion.

Measurement

Keep a per-partner ledger, both directions, tracking:

Mentions delivered, with dates and links.
Tagged-link clicks.
Codes redeemed.
Registrations attributed.
Ease of collaboration (qualitative).
Both sides' intent to recur (qualitative).

Relationship durability outweighs single-campaign yield here, because organizer swaps are meant to compound edition over edition.

Set redemption and referral targets before launch and label them self-set: referral value depends on the two communities involved and does not transfer from one partnership to the next. Success on a first swap is modest and honest:

Attribution worked.
Both sides delivered what the agreement said.
The measured numbers, whatever they are, become your own baseline for the next edition.
Both sides want to do it again.

Invocation examples

"The Rust conference two cities over has roughly our audience - set up a cross-promo with them for our October edition."
"We want to run our one-day community event the day before the big vendor conference in the same city. How do we approach them?"
"Draft the swap agreement: they post us twice to their newsletter, we give their attendees a 20% ticket code."

References

references/partner-scoring-and-outreach.md - candidate-mapping sources, per-criterion scoring checks, the parity heuristic, the organizer-to-organizer outreach template.
references/swap-formats-and-agreement.md - per-format execution detail, the co-location model, the lightweight agreement outline, the delivery ledger.