Nathan Wrigley’s Jukebox Podcast on WP Tavern recently explored how companies can rethink sponsoring WordPress contributions. Guest Roger Williams, who leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, described the hosting company’s sponsored contributions program (launched January 2025) and shared practical guidance for organisations and contributors looking to build sustainable support for WordPress and other open source projects.

Why sponsor contributors?
Open source began as voluntary effort, but with WordPress powering over 40% of the web, sustainability matters. Roger frames sponsorship as a spectrum between philanthropy and business value: to win internal support, companies should explain both altruistic and return-on-investment (ROI) reasons for funding contributors.

Three persuasive business arguments
– Strategic: Better performance, security, and stability in WordPress directly reduce customer issues and costs for vendors and hosts. Sponsoring work that improves core systems can protect revenue and reputation.
– Operational: Funding work upstream reduces technical debt. Fixes and features merged into projects mean fewer internal patches, lower maintenance, and streamlined operations.
– Second-order: Harder-to-measure benefits include improved recruiting, networking, brand goodwill, training, and deeper community relationships. These often tip executive decisions when combined with strategic and operational cases.

Who to sponsor and scope
Sponsorship needn’t be limited to core engineering. Useful targets include:
– Core contributors for code, bug fixes, and features
– Polyglots for translations and localization
– Documentation authors who reduce support load and onboarding friction
– Event organisers and contributor days that grow the community
– Content creators, podcasters, and outreach efforts that raise awareness

Kinsta’s approach was pragmatic: set a modest budget, start small, learn, and iterate. Sponsored contributors are a low-friction first step—existing community members continue their project work while receiving financial support, avoiding the complications of reallocating internal staff.

Practical process recommendations
– Intake form: Collect basic info—what the contributor works on, past contributions, goals, and needs.
– Evaluation criteria: Prioritise demonstrable contributions, community reputation, and mentoring or onboarding skills.
– Tactful marketing asks: Agree on light visibility (a blog post, podcast appearance, or brief mention), but keep the primary focus on project work, not promotion.
– Track outcomes: Use a simple tracker (spreadsheet or lightweight tool) to show how funds are used and what was achieved for internal stakeholders.
– Legal preparedness: Decide the level of formality required up front (sponsorship agreements, scopes of work, or basic terms) to avoid surprises.

How contributors should approach sponsors
– Bring a proposal, not just a plea: Describe what you work on, the business impact, and how sponsorship benefits both the project and the sponsor.
– Target likely sponsors first: Hosting companies, plugin/theme vendors, and service providers often have the most direct interest.
– Speak business language: Explain strategic and operational value, not just community or personal motivations.

Avoiding community friction
Commercial sponsorship can raise concerns among volunteers. Roger’s advice is to broaden the conversation, not replace volunteerism. Thoughtful sponsorship increases resources and enables more contributors to do sustained work while core volunteers retain influence over priorities and implementation.

Consortiums and collective models
Consortiums like the WP Community Collective (WPCC) can coordinate and distribute funds. These models are useful but can add complexity and slow decision-making. For organisations starting out, Roger recommends iterating quickly with internal pilots while remaining open to later collaboration with broader initiatives.

Internal selling points for organisations
– Tailor the pitch to organisational priorities (e.g., focus on performance for hosts, localization for companies with global customers).
– Be patient but prepared: budget cycles can take months—have candidate contributors and a framework ready so you can act when funding opens.
– Anticipate objections: Use the strategic/operational/second-order framework to answer questions from CTOs, CMOs, and finance teams.
– Make success visible: Report concrete outputs—merged patches, documentation updates, events, or media exposure—to justify ongoing support.

Final thoughts
Start small: allocate a modest budget, create simple intake and tracking processes, and sponsor contributors whose work aligns with company goals. Treat sponsorship as part of your broader brand and community strategy, prioritise the project’s needs, and respect community norms. Be collaborative and measured to avoid undermining volunteer effort.

Where to find Roger
Roger Williams is available on LinkedIn and welcomes conversations about building sponsorship programs that support WordPress and open source.

This conversation provides practical steps for companies and contributors to engage in sponsored contributions while balancing business needs with the open source ethos—helping make WordPress more sustainable for everyone.

Nathan Wrigley interviews Roger Williams, Kinsta’s Partnership and Community Manager for North America, about building a pragmatic sponsored contributions program for WordPress and other open source projects. Roger helped launch Kinsta’s program in early 2025 and outlines how companies can fund contributors in ways that align with business needs while supporting the broader ecosystem.

Why this matters

WordPress powers a large share of the web, and maintaining it requires ongoing work across code, docs, translations, and events. Many organizations rely on WordPress but don’t contribute. Roger’s aim is to move these companies from passive users to active supporters by framing sponsorship as a practical business investment, not only philanthropy.

Three audiences to engage

– Existing contributors: people already working inside the project. They’re the obvious recipients of support.
– Users who could contribute: agencies, product teams, and professionals who use WordPress but need a nudge and a clear business case.
– The public: non-technical stakeholders who don’t understand how open source is sustained and why funding matters.

Reframing sponsorship around ROI

Roger recommends talking to companies in the language of return on investment. He groups benefits into three categories:

– Strategic: Improvements to performance, security, and stability reduce product risk, lower support costs, and strengthen a company’s offering.
– Operational: Sponsoring maintenance work and bug fixes helps manage technical debt and reduces internal engineering burden.
– Second-order benefits: Networking, hiring pipelines, brand goodwill, and developer skill growth are less tangible but valuable over time.

Who to sponsor

Sponsorship shouldn’t be limited to core developers. Documentation writers, Polyglots (translation teams), event organizers, and accessibility contributors all improve WordPress’s usability and reach. Kinsta focuses on areas that align with its business—performance, security, multilingual support—so sponsoring Polyglots and docs is strategic for them.

Practical steps for companies starting to sponsor

– Start small and iterate. Don’t wait for a perfect process.
– Set a realistic budget and make sponsorship repeatable.
– Create a simple intake form asking what the contributor works on, past contributions, goals, and whether they’ll do low-effort promotional actions (e.g., a short blog post or podcast conversation).
– Keep marketing requests minimal and respectful: sponsorship primarily supports the project, not a heavy-handed ad campaign.

Advice for contributors seeking sponsorship

– Pitch clearly: explain what you do, how it benefits the company, and what outcomes they can expect.
– Ask direct questions: does the company have a sponsored contributions program? If not, offer to help create one.
– Speak business: frame your work in strategic or operational terms as well as community impact.

Promotion and ROI expectations

Roger suggests treating sponsorship as a brand activity with indirect returns. Sponsored contributors will naturally mention their supporters, generating organic goodwill. Companies can gently amplify this with interviews or posts, but should avoid making sponsorship a marketing quid pro quo that distracts contributors from their work.

Coordination: solo efforts vs consortia

Programs like the WP Community Collective centralize funding, but collective efforts add governance complexity. Roger’s pragmatic advice: start with company-by-company sponsorships to maintain momentum, and consider collaborative models once patterns and needs are clearer.

Securing internal buy-in

Prepare to make the case internally by:

– Aligning sponsorship choices with organisational goals (for example, funding Polyglots if you serve multilingual customers).
– Being ready to act when budgets are approved—set up lightweight processes and relationships ahead of time.
– Anticipating objections with tailored arguments for different stakeholders (CTOs will care about risk and maintenance, marketing about brand and recruitment, executives about strategic value).

Operational details to decide early

Decide how funds will move: direct payments, GitHub Sponsors, contracts, or grants. Keep any agreements simple and clear about expectations for promotion or deliverables. Limit asks of contributors so sponsorship enables their work rather than becoming an advertising demand.

Relationship building and next steps

Kinsta assigns named contacts for sponsorships to make outreach straightforward. Roger encourages conversations and feedback—he’s active on LinkedIn for follow-ups. The core message is: start now. Sponsorship programs will evolve; the priority is creating transparent, repeatable processes that make it easy for contributors to apply and for companies to sponsor.

Summary

Broaden the contribution conversation beyond pure philanthropy by clearly communicating business-aligned benefits, begin with small, structured programs, and treat sponsorship as both brand and operational strategy. Keep marketing respectful, support a wide range of roles (docs, translations, events), and build relationships so contributions flow sustainably back into the projects you depend on.