Reimagining Sponsored Contributions for WordPress

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.