Sponsorship

What a sponsor gets

One country. Your name, and a wordmark if you have one, in the small print at the foot of every grade page and every examination page belonging to that country, beside the note saying which file the page was built from, and again in each of that country's sections on the grades and examinations index pages, so it is there whichever part of a country's material a reader has narrowed down to.

• One sponsor per country, ever. There is no second slot to sell you later, and nobody else is ever named beside you in your country. Where an index page lists several countries, each credit sits inside its own country's section.
• Below the content, never around it. The credit sits after the reference has finished. It is never in the header, never above the fold, never between a technique and its key points.
• Only that country's material. A reader who has set their country to another one never sees you, because the same filter that hides the section hides the credit inside it. Techniques, categories and everything the site publishes for all countries carry no sponsor at all.
• Text and one still image. No banner, no pop-up, no interstitial, no animation, no autoplay, nothing that moves or interrupts.
• A fixed term that ends. See below.

Be clear about what that is worth before you offer anything for it. There are no analytics on this site, so there are no impressions, clicks or visitor numbers to report to you, this year or any year. What you are buying is a named place on a free reference that judoka use to prepare for gradings, and the knowledge that nobody else can appear beside you.

Work is worth more than money

The hosting and the domain are the owner's own affair and always will be. Nobody is asked to cover them and nobody may. What genuinely moves this reference forward is work, and if you can supply it directly that is worth more than the equivalent in cash:

• Translation. Carrying a language across the reference, or keeping one current as it grows.
• Photography or illustration of techniques, shot for this purpose and licensed so the project can pass it on.

Work holds a country's slot on exactly the same terms as money. Someone who carries a whole language is credited on that country's pages for the term, in the same words and the same place as anyone else. There is no lesser tier, and there is no price list on this page because there is no price.

The term, and how it ends

A sponsorship runs for an agreed period, normally a year, with a start date and an end date fixed at the outset. On the end date it stops: the credit comes off that country's pages at the next rebuild and the slot is open again.

Nothing rolls over automatically and nothing renews itself. If both sides want to continue, that is a conversation before the end date, not a default. You will not be billed for a period you did not agree to, and you cannot be left credited on a site you have finished with.

The arrangement can change; your term cannot. Today there is one slot per country. If a country ever draws more interest than one slot can hold, the site may divide slots by governing body instead, so that a federation's material carries its own sponsor rather than a national one carrying everybody's. A change of that kind would apply to new terms only. What you agreed to is what you have until your end date, exclusivity included, and nothing is rearranged underneath a sponsorship that is running.

Either side can end it earlier. Ask for your name to come off and it comes off, without explanation.

What we would need from you

Your name as you want it written, a web address if you want the credit to link to one, and optionally a wordmark. A credit with no image is the default and is perfectly normal here.

• A static file, SVG or WebP, which we host on this site. Nothing on any page may load from another company's server, so a hosted logo, a tag, a pixel or a script cannot be used. This is how the site stays free of tracking, and there is no exception to it.
• One file, or two. The site has a dark theme and an image is not altered by it, so a wordmark in dark ink alone disappears at night. Send one version that reads on both backgrounds, or send a light and a dark version and the page will show whichever suits the reader's theme.
• Alt text. Blind and partially sighted judoka are a first-class audience here, and for a reader using a screen reader that sentence is the credit.

Who we would turn down

Children preparing for their first gradings read these pages, so anything that would not belong in a junior dojo does not belong here either. Beyond that, the site can decline any offer without giving a reason, and being able to do that without consequence is the reason none of this is depended on.

A federation or association is welcome to hold a country's slot, including one whose grading syllabus this site publishes. Two things stay true if it does: the credit reads supported by and never in partnership with, and holding the slot changes nothing about how that scheme, or any rival scheme in the same country, is presented. This site is independent of every governing body and says so on the about page.

The countries with a slot

A country has a slot once the reference carries a grading scheme or an examination paper for it, and this list comes straight from that content rather than being written by hand:

• SpainOpen
• United KingdomOpen
• United StatesOpen

Every one of them is open, because nobody sponsors this site at present. The line at the foot of those pages says so in as many words.

If you would like to

Say which country, what you would like to give, and how you want to be named. There is no form and no proposal to write.

Email about sponsorship

That is [email protected]. It is a forwarding address, published in plain text on purpose: hiding an address behind script defeats screen readers, and this project ranks a blind reader above a scraper.