First and foremost, NaNoWriMo has worked with sponsors and affiliate partners for many years. These are mutually beneficial arrangements. Our sponsors gain the opportunity to be discovered by writers who may be interested in their offerings, while revenue we bring in from our sponsors is part of what allows us to provide free services to our community.
These relationships ultimately serve Wrimos, who gain access to free tools, free trials, and discounts from sponsors who love our mission. Our sponsors have historically been huge cheerleaders for NaNoWriMo; they often cross-promote our November challenge and our camps. In other words, these relationships aren't purely transactional. Some of our sponsors work with us to serve their business goals, but all of our sponsors care about supporting the writers in our community and making it easier for them to gain access to resources.
Here's what we can say about year-over-year changes: if you look on our sponsors' blogs, at their event calendars, and at all they are doing within the writing community, the fact that we haven't promoted more of their programming in the past was a miss on NaNoWriMo's part. Part of our mission is to provide resources to writers, and our sponsors offer a lot more than coupon discounts--they themselves are entrenched in the writing community, in service of writers. We are proud to bring you more of what they offer, and we're pleased by the way that we've partnered with them more closely to develop programming that is relevant to Wrimos (another thing we did this year that had never been done was to retroactively analyze which content received the most community interest across all of our channels). We've worked with some of our sponsors to custom-design materials for Wrimos, which is a tremendous benefit to all of you.
A final thing we want to address here is the illusion of free, to the extent that we've seen some "It's all about money" and "NaNoWriMo is selling out to its sponsors" types of criticisms in reaction to the fact that sponsored content is more visible this year. We encourage folks who are making those kinds of comments to examine that framing. NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit. We are not an organization that has the ability to get rich or to make shareholders rich by "selling out" (we don't have shareholders). No employee or NaNoWriMo insider personally benefits from us making sponsored content more visible. The only ones who stand to benefit from our sponsor relationships are members of our community. Our sponsor relationships don't serve any private interests. They serve our mission,
We also want to say very clearly that every nonprofit that provides free services needs funding in order to make those services free. Seeking corporate sponsorships is a widely-accepted practice within the nonprofit industry (check out this article from the Council on Nonprofits) and we stand by it.