How to get the most out of your sponsorship

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Ada Lovelace Day has built up a huge amount of goodwill around the world over the 15 years since I founded it, yet very few of our sponsors take the time to tap into that. And they’re missing out. Actively engaging your staff and community in Ada Lovelace Day is both easy and rewarding, and doing so helps you to demonstrate your commitment to gender equity. Telling people you care about them is never as powerful as showing through your actions.

So what can you do to make sure that you get the very best out of your time as an Ada Lovelace Day sponsor?

Engage your internal community

Talking about Ada Lovelace Day to your staff is a great way to foster engagement with both the day itself and your sponsorship of it. If you have a women’s network or employee resource group (ERG), then make sure that they know about us as an organisation and that they are kept up to date with our Ada Lovelace Day Live event at the Royal Institution on Tuesday 8 October.

Encourage your staff to follow us via social media and subscribe to our newsletter, and share our own news, such as new speaker announcements or new grassroots events being held around the world. People like to feel that they are part of a bigger movement and Ada Lovelace Day truly is a global movement with events held every year on all inhabited continents, so talking about what’s happening is a great way to help your staff feel connected.

Engage your external community

When you become an Ada Lovelace Day sponsor, you have a chance to share news about our event with your customers and communities. It’s not just an opportunity for you to demonstrate your commitment to gender equity, it also helps us to reach new audiences. It’s a genuine win-win.

Whether you’re using social media, your community newsletter or talking about Ada Lovelace Day with clients and customers, you can use Ada Lovelace Day as a jumping off point for a broader discussion about the need to support women in STEM and what  your company is doing to move further towards gender balance in the workplace. And you can do this throughout the run up, as well as after the day, not just on the day itself.

You can also encourage your community to attend Ada Lovelace Day themselves, or organise their own grassroots event or livestream watch party. Our aim is to get as many people as possible to take part in Ada Lovelace Day, and that’s a goal we hope our sponsors share.

It’s also important for you to talk to other business leaders in your network about the day and your sponsorship of it. This doesn’t just establish you as a flagbearer for gender equity, it also signals to other companies how they can get involved and what they can get out of taking part.

Use your perks

We also provide all our sponsors with perks such as free tickets to Ada Lovelace Day Live, in-person or online, as well as discount codes and opportunities for me to come and speak to your staff about Ada Lovelace, or a variety of other topics. A surprising number of sponsors don’t use these perks, so rather than see them go to waste, spend a little time planning how you’re going to use them:

  • Free in-person tickets: You can give these to anyone, so you could hand them out to staff, or run a ticket giveaway for your community.
  • Discount codes: All sponsors are given a discount code for in-person tickets to Ada Lovelace Day Live. You can share these internally with staff, or via any private mailing lists or fora you are a part of. Please don’t share them publicly.
  • Free livestreaming tickets: You can use these for your own staff to watch the event remotely, or you can use them to organise an in-person watch-party for your staff or community.

This  year, I am offering all sponsors a one hour presentation that explores Ada Lovelace’s story and how she came to become a computing pioneer, as well as a look at the work we’ve done with Ada Lovelace Day over the years. I’m also offering to organise a webinar – either public or private to your own staff only – with a female leader from your organisation, talking about gender equality, women in STEM or any other relevant topic.

Ada Lovelace Day isn’t just a great event or a global celebration of women in STEM, it’s also a fantastic way for you to engage more fully with your staff and your community around the topic of gender equality. With a little thinking ahead, it can be incorporated into your comms and event planning for the year so that you can truly get the most from your sponsorship investment.

How do you know if you’re ready to sponsor Ada Lovelace Day? 

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We have had some amazing sponsors over the years, but we’ve also learnt a lot about when a company is ready to become a sponsor. So here are a few of the things that you should have in place before you get in touch. If you can say yes to the majority of these points, then the process of committing to sponsorship will run more smoothly, and you’ll be able to tick ‘Sponsor Ada Lovelace Day’ off your To Do List that much more quickly.

1. You know how big your budget is

We have a number of different sponsorship packages designed to suit a variety of budgets, but it really helps if you know how much money you have to spend before you get in touch. That means that I can guide you to the right package with the right add-ons immediately, and we can then discuss the more important topic of how you can get the most out of your sponsorship.

2. Your budget is already signed off

We’ve made our sponsorship prospectus, including our pricing information, available for anyone to download. Just enter your email address below and you’ll get the download link by return. This means that you can discuss your options with your colleagues and get sign off – or as close as possible to it – before we have a call. Again, the benefits of this is that it makes the process much faster if you’ve already got budgetary approval.

3. Your decision maker is up-to-speed and engaged

We know that a lot of the people who come to us aren’t the final decision makers, so we understand that you might need to download our prospectus and then have some discussions internally before you can get in touch with me. We have a lot of information on our website and social media that you can show any decision makers so that they can see the kind of event they are supporting and the work that we do alongside Ada Lovelace Day Live.

Here are a selection of links you might like to share with them:

  • Our YouTube channel has videos of all our previous Ada Lovelace Day Live events up to 2019 (2023 is coming soon!) and the events we ran online during the pandemic from 2020–2022.
  • Our most recent newsletters and weekly emails are available to browse here.
  • We have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Bluesky accounts you can look through.
  • You can take a look at our Ada Lovelace Day content marathons from 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020 on our website, along with a whole host of other information.
  • And you can learn a little about me, Suw Charman-Anderson, and our Advisory Council, the people who help to steer Ada Lovelace Day and our activities, on our website as well.
  • If you have any specific questions that aren’t answered on our website, please do not hesitate to email me.

4. You have all your own paperwork to hand

Some sponsors require us to sign agreements on how we can use their logo, name, URL or other assets, and/or to sign a contract. That’s absolutely fine. We understand that some companies need these agreements in place to protect their intellectual property and investment. Just send over the paperwork as soon as we’ve agreed your sponsorship package and I’ll get it sorted out.

You will also need to have a high quality version of your logo ready, along with a two paragraph description of your company and your preferred website and social media URLs, so that we can get you up on our sponsor page immediately. If you have an embargo on the announcement that you’re a sponsor, just tell us up front and we’ll make sure we don’t break it!

5. You have your invoicing process details ready

As a very small business, our invoicing terms are 30 days, and we appreciate sponsors who can stick to this. We also understand that you may need us to complete a new supplier form and to then raise a purchase order in order for us to begin the invoicing process. Please ensure that you know your company’s invoicing process and can give us the information we need to smooth the invoicing process. If your company pays on 60 or 90 days, please let us know and ask your finance team if they can expedite payment.

Finally, if you’re a start-up that’s still seeking funding, a small business without enough budget for one of our sponsorship packages, a large business without an engaged decision maker or you’re just not quite ready to sponsor us, then why not support Ada Lovelace Day by organising a watch-party for our event in October? Livestream tickets will be available to buy in bulk in due course, and giving all your employees a ticket is a marvellous way to take part!

You can also talk about Ada Lovelace Day to your staff, encourage them to sign up to our newsletter or follow us on social media, and talk about our work and share our blog posts and other activities with your own community. In an age where it’s getting harder and harder for us to reach new audiences, sharing our work is more important than ever. So whatever your budget, please get involved!

ALD23: Dr Marie Poland Fish, Oceanographer and Marine Biologist

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Dr Marie Poland Fish

Dr Marie “Bobbie” Dennis Poland Fish was an American oceanographer and marine biologist who founded the field of marine bioacoustics (the study of how marine wildlife uses and produces sound). Her pioneering research saw her record and analyse the sounds of hundreds of species of marine life, enabling the United States Navy to distinguish between enemy vessels and underwater creatures.

Fish was born Marie Poland in Paterson, New Jersey in 1900. She graduated from Smith College in 1921, later receiving a PhD in science from the University of Rhode Island. In 1923, after spending a year as research assistant to the plankton scientist (and her soon-to-be husband) Charles Fish, she was hired to study fish eggs and larvae for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.

In February 1925, Fish left the US for a six-month oceanographic expedition through the Sargasso Sea to the Galápagos Islands. During this trip, she became the first person to identify the eggs of the elusive American eel by carefully collecting them and watching them develop. Her discovery, she wrote later, revealed “the last secret concerning the life history of the American eel which [the sea had] jealously guarded for so many centuries”.

Fish worked in ichthyology (fish biology) at various institutions from the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. These included the Conservation Department of New York and the U.S. National Museum, now the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. In 1936, she and her husband established a marine lab at the University of Rhode Island, which still exists as the university’s Graduate School of Oceanography. Such was her renown as a marine biologist that when the US Navy needed help with a long-standing mystery, it was Fish they contacted.

Since the start of World War II, submarine crews and sonar operators in the Navy had been perplexed by strange underwater sounds, from rumbling and beeping to hammering, clanging and clicking. These sounds were sometimes so loud they threatened to detonate mines and sink ships. The Navy suspected that marine life, rather than enemy submarines, could be behind them – and once the war was over in 1946, Fish was brought on to investigate.

She got to work cataloguing the sounds heard by Navy officers, then launched experiments from her base at the University of Rhode Island. Using techniques including lowering hydrophones into Narragansett Bay, she was able to match previously mysterious noises with the sea life that created them. By 1954, Fish had identified the sounds of more than 180 species through what she called her “underwater detective agency”, both in Rhode Island and via expeditions to the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. She had built up a huge acoustic library on recording discs, which the Navy used to train sonar operators to tell the difference between hostile subs or boats and marine life.

Fish was also sent to Europe to train allied Navy operators in France, England and Germany. In addition, her work explored how underwater wildlife makes sound; before the process was formally described, she had correctly hypothesised that whales communicate via echolocation.

Fish died on 2 February 1989 at the age of 88, having written over 200 articles in academic journals and popular magazines and recorded and analysed the sounds of more than 300 species of marine life. She received the United States Navy’s highest civilian award, the Distinguished Service Medal, in 1966.

Further Reading

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.

ALD23: Jenifer Castillo, Engineer

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Jenifer Castillo

Jenifer Castillo is a Colombian engineer. She was the first Latina to lead the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Women in Engineering (IEEE WIE), the largest professional organisation dedicated to promoting women engineers and scientists in the world.

Born and raised in Colombia, Castillo followed in family footsteps when it came to her career path: her father was a computer engineer, while her brother is an industrial engineer. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in mechatronics engineering at Universidad de San Buenaventura Bogota in 2006, pursuing her interest in process automation and robotics.

After university, Castillo joined Parker Hannifin, an engineering company specialising in motion and control technology, as a product specialist in their Bogotá office. She left in 2011 to take a job as an application engineer in Ingersoll Rand’s Colombian team, helping develop compressed-air projects.

Throughout these career moves, Castillo continued to volunteer for IEEE WIE, which she had first become involved with as a student. The group works to facilitate the recruitment and retention of women in technical disciplines around the world; Castillo held several positions including section chair and region secretary, and established the IEEE Colombia WIE group.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Castillo co-led Together We Can – Project Bright, an award-winning endeavour that saw volunteers and IEEE staffers raise donations and supply hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico with solar lanterns. She went on to complete an MBA in business administration at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico in 2019, setting up the IEEE Puerto Rico and Caribbean Section’s WIE group during her master’s.

Between the start of 2021 and the end of 2022, Castillo was the Women in Engineering Committee Chair at the IEEE, leading the promotion of WIE objectives around the world. Her priorities as chair were supporting ongoing diversity and inclusion initiatives and increasing the number of female IEEE senior members. She remains a member of the IEEE Women in Engineering executive committee for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Castillo is currently a sales and account manager for the worldwide aircraft maintenance company Lufthansa Technik. Previously, she was territory manager and then project specifications manager in Latin America for Parker Hannifin. In November 2020, she was honoured with the IEEE MGA Achievement Award, recognising her “sustained and outstanding achievements in promoting students, young people, and WIE membership development in Latin America”.

Further Reading

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.

ALD23 Books: The Possibility of Life: Searching for Kinship in the Cosmos, Jaime Green

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The Possibility of Life: Searching for Kinship in the Cosmos, Jaime Green

One of the most potent questions we often ask about the cosmos is: are we alone? From the field of astrobiology to the search for exoplanets in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’, Jaime Green’s The Possibility of Life traces our understanding of what and where life in the universe could be, drawing upon the long tradition of writers and artists who have stimulated scientific research through the creation of imaginary worlds. 

Bringing together expert interviews, cutting-edge astronomy, philosophical inquiries and pop-culture touchstones ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Star Trek, The Possibility of Life delves into our evolving conception of the cosmos to wonder what we might find … out there.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk. 

About the Author

Jaime Green is a science writer, essayist, editor, and teacher, and she is the series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University, and her writing has since appeared in Slate, Popular Science, The New York Times Book Review, American Theatre, Catapult, Astrobites and elsewhere.

Jaime has taught writing at Columbia University, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts (The New School), Catapult, and the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She also hosts readings and author interviews at book launches and events.

You can follow Jaime Green’s work here:

Twitter: @jaimealyse
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaimealyse
Website: jaimegreen.net

With thanks to Synergy for their support.