We have complete confidence that you and your team will organize a celebration that is focused on the needs of your community. We understand that each location may have different levels of exposure to information architecture and we welcome celebrations of any size.

World IA Day is completely volunteer-run with operational support from the Information Architecture Institute. We rely on global sponsorship to secure funding and give-a-ways for our locations. For this reason, it is important that our organization presents itself professionally to current and potential sponsors and we ask that you follow a few guidelines to help us in this effort.

Local teams should become familiar with our driving principles, our code of conduct and our privacy policy. These documents will help you better understand our mission, our core values and what we expect from all locations representing our organization.

Creating an environment that accommodates all attendees is very important to our organization. Attendance should not be limited to certain people. We are a community that embraces diversity. Each celebration should emulate a welcoming and accessible environment.

We will provide guidance on how to make your celebration inclusive to people with who may need special assistance and we reserve the right to grant financial assistance to locations who need to accommodate these attendees over other grant requests.

Since its inception in 2012, World IA Day has grown exponentially from the first 12 locations to over 50 locations!

Because of our growth, we have reached a point where sponsorship at the global level is more attractive. We rely on global sponsors annually to fund our grant program and donate give-a-ways for all of our locations. Maintaining a consistent brand presence is an extremely important factor to retaining existing sponsors and attracting new ones.

We ask that you adhere to our brand guidelines to help us maintain a consistent presence throughout the world. We provide our locations with visual assets that can be used to help promote your celebration.

From time to time, we may send you an email or ask you to participate in surveys. It is important that you maintain a good level of communication with the global team. Responding to surveys helps us better understand which locations need assistance and gives us a high level view of progress so that we may keep the IA Institute Board of Directors up to date. Your timely response is very much appreciated.

We will provide each location with a page on the worldiaday.org website. You will be able to author content about your event, advertise your local sponsors, and introduce your local team.

We expect all locations to maintain their page so that people locally and around the world can view up-to-date information about all of our celebrations in one place. Instructions for updating your location page can be found here.

A lot of love goes into organizing a World IA Day celebration and we want to share each unique celebration with the world. Contributing photographs, and recorded audio or video of each presentation will help us achieve our goal of creating a free online content library to help promote participating communities around the world.

Our A/V Setup Guide can be in Chapter 03 of this guidebook.

We understand that partnerships can be an important factor to secure sponsorship funding. We do encourage cross-organizational support, but feel it is important to maintain that the celebration is World IA Day. We owe it to our gracious sponsors who give us funding or resources to support all of our locations at the global level.

We believe World IA Day should be free and open to all. However, we understand some locations may need to charge a reasonable fee to help cover expenses.

We trust each location will decide what is best for their community and will offer a low-cost or free option to support economic inclusivity. Locations that decide to charge admission will need to submit the proposed ticket price for approval by the global team.

The idea of World IA Day is to be sustainable, which is a different goal than to be profitable. If your celebration takes in more money than it cost to put on, the expectation is that "overage" goes back to the World IA Day Grant Fund to help support next year's celebrations.

Some locations establish not-for-profit organizations to keep finances in order or apply for certain types of funding like grants. If you decide to do this and open your own bank account, please be aware that each location organizer is expected to comply with the required local tax regulations within their region. The World IA Day organization and the IA Institute will not assume any liability for issues arising due to non-compliance.

Sponsorship donations can be processed through the IA Institute. If you choose to go through the IA Institute for reimbursement, please note that you may be required to disclose budgetary information in order for our organization to comply with US tax regulations.

Each year we do our best to secure funding from global sponsors. We use this money to offer financial assistance to locations that need help with certain operational expenses centered around accessibility and emergencies that might arise. We will notify you when our grant application is open. You can learn more about the emergency grant in Chapter 6.

For any questions or concerns, contact the Global Executive Producer at [email protected]