Become a Sponsor

All of the thousands of tools, parts, and pieces of equipment in our facility are donated through sponsor support. The Geek Group has hundreds of sponsors worldwide spanning every imaginable area of product, service and industry. Some sponsors donate simple things such as nuts and bolts, raw materials such as wire or steel, and others donate large finished goods such as multi-million dollar robotics systems. All of them are absolutely paramount to the day to day operation of the Group and our ability to bring science and technology to everyone who walks through our doors. We simply cannot build projects without parts. It is only through the continued support of our sponsors that the Group is able to build the incredible things we do.

Because we so highly value the support of our sponsors we are continually looking for ways that we can improve our abilities to help those that help us. In the 2007 season we began a radical shift in sponsor involvement with the move from just placing sponsor logos on the projects and on the website, to giving each sponsor an entire web page on our main site of their own, to showcase their own text, images, and any content or information they want to include. We are the only organization in the world to do this level of sponsorship involvement, and are proud to be the first.

Each sponsor of The Geek Group receives the following considerations and support.

1. All donations are tax-deductible. The Geek Group is a Federally certified 501(c)3 non profit and is registered with the IRS. Documentation for this is available through our corporate offices and also easily located on the IRS website at the Search for Charities. the value of a donation is determined through "Fair Market Value". This means that you cannot send us a truckload of used tires and claim they're "Space Age Polymer Rotational Friction Enhancement Toroids" with a value of $300,000,000 a piece. However, you are perfectly legal in having a factory that makes widgets and sending us your discontinued models, or scratched case models, etc that you would have normally tossed in a dumpster with the full expectation of getting 70% or so of what you could have sold them for. This is often much better than tossing them in the trash.

2. YOU decide what the value of a donation is. By law we are absolutely not allowed to set the value of a donation. If it's a vehicle, the Blue Book is the standard measure. If it's a product that you manufacture, you know what it's worth. If it's something else, eBay is a wonderful place to find what a fair market value of a given object is. If you're still not sure, call us and we can help, but the final choice must be yours.

3. All sponsors have their logo featured in several places on our website. All sponsor logos are added to the main rotation on the main page. Beyond that, each individual sponsor will have their logo featured on every other page of our website that in any way references their product, any projects that include their product, or the specific lab that houses their product. This means that if you donated a GPS unit that was installed in Geekmobile Unit-2 (our stormchaser), it would be featured on the main Group page, the Heavy Industries page (the building that houses the VSL), the VSL main page (our vehicular sciences lab), the Geekmobile page, the project page for Geek-2, and any of the associated Wiki pages.

Each of these logos is a clickable link, that will direct to a dedicated page that is specifically for that sponsor. The sponsor is completely free to write their own sponsor page. You are allowed to include anything you wish, no rules at all. You can showcase your products, change it as often as you like, include pictures, text, videos, links, you name it. It's also very easy to do. You simply email the text and images and other information to us and our web development team will handle writing all of the code and formatting to make it look great and function perfectly.

4. If you send us a banner (typically about 2 feet tall and 5 feet wide) with your sponsor logo, URL, and information we will proudly hang it in the main demonstration hall or your associated lab space. This will be seen by all of our members and visitors to the lab. We also make a point of displaying your banner in the background of any videos we shoot with projects featuring your product.

5. We are not UL or Consumer Reports. We will not display your product in any video or images placed directly next to a competitors. We do not do reviews or marketing for other people. We are not influenced by 3rd parties. We're Geeks. If you're nice enough to send us your toys to play with, we respect that and are nice enough to not share your shortcomings with the world. If you wish to have private testing done, have us do betatesting work, or just have someone outside your company give your product some real world testing and abuse and tell you about it, we're happy to do so privately. Contact our Advanced Research Lab for details.

6. With the exception of raw surplus we never sell anything that is donated. All donations are kept for their entire useful life, then repaired, patched, beaten into several more years of semi-useful life. Eventually when a product is no longer usable we tend to autopsy it to find how it died, strip it to it's base parts, and re-use the parts. Most donations of parts and suchlike are put into a specific project. Things like machinery, tools, etc last for many years and fall into the repair/reclaim cycle eventually.

The only things that are ever sold is in instances where we require say 5 capacitors for something, the sponsor sends us a pallet full of 20,000 of them on reels. We keep what we need, what we can reasonably expect to use within 10 years, and sell the rest at one of our regular surplus sales (which are primarily limited to our membership). We will never return any donated goods directly to the open market. Things like real estate are required by law to remain on our books for a minimum of 2 years (and we never sell cars or land anyway as it's far too valuable to our operation).

With certain rare cases where we have prototypical products donated or whatnot, at the end of it's use life it is either placed into our museum on display, returned to the manufacturer, or destroyed completely (fire, sledgehammers, implements of destruction, etc). This is entirely up to the sponsor as to how they would like things handled.

7. There are certain things we absolutely will NOT accept as donations. These include truckloads of 15" CRT monitors, any nonworking monitors, anything biohazardous, PCB filled transformers or capacitors, and junk batteries. We WILL accept most everything else, but we require advanced notice, proper shipment, proper containment, and proper labeling of every single piece of hazardous, explosive, poison, or otherwise harmful substances and materials before we will accept them. We're happy to add your radioactive isotopes to our collection, but you can't send it to us in a baggie.

8. All sponsors will be provided with professional still photography of their product as it is used by the Group. This can include project shots, classroom/lab shots, etc featuring their product. All of these images are available to the sponsor free of charge or license and the sponsor has the right to use them for their own marketing/promotion indefinitely.

9. We will often shoot How-To videos that feature a product. This can include how to install he product, how to use/program/setup a product, or various other applications of a given product (some often far from the typical application intended by the sponsor). Copies of these videos will all be given free of charge to the sponsor for their legal use in any manner they choose. This can include marketing, promotion, resale, etc. Some larger products can have entire classes built around them (like certain tools, robots, etc) and can easily end up featured in over a hundred videos.

10. If a sponsor wants a specific product video or images not for Group use but created by our production team and recording studio we're happy to help. The sponsor will be responsible for production costs and the videos/images will be the sole property of the sponsor, not the Group. Please contact us for pricing and details.

11. Please ship all donations to:

The Geek Group
2309 N.Burdick St.
Kalamazoo, MI
49007

Unless prior arrangements have been made it is the donors responsibility to pay for shipping. This is also a deductible part of the donation.

12. The Geek Group will provide, on request, a written Release Of Liability document for your company. All donations to the Group immediately become the sole property, liability, and responsibility of the Group upon acceptance of the package at our loading dock. This means that if you donate a table-saw to us and one of our staff or members cuts a finger off with it, it's not your responsibility and we agree not to sue you for our own stupidity. The Group has a longstanding position of self-reliance and self-responsibility, this extends to how we treat our sponsors. We knowingly play with very dangerous toys here on a regular basis, we accept the responsibility and risk with a smile. If one of our students uses a robot that you donated to stomp across Tokyo, don't worry, it's our problem.

We'll make sure to get you some great video of it though if you ask nicely. ;)

13. WE WANT YOUR TRASH! We ask all of our sponsors to please remember us on trash day. It's very likely that many of the things you would toss in your dumpster and have to pay someone to haul away would be better put to use in our lab and get you a nice tax writeoff in the process.

This doesn't mean that we want your old coffee grounds. What it means is that if you own a manufacturing facility, research lab, school, etc that we can make use of a LOT of your Junque.

Some of the things we can make use of are:
Anything electronic, any manner of office equipment/furniture.
Audio Video equipment and supplies (like those old VHS training tapes you have in the back room).
Laboratory Equipment and supplies (especially testing gear and glassware).
Any manner of tool, hand tool, power tool, etc.
Any and all robotics, from full units to just component parts.
Any materials handling items (forklifts, pallet jacks, chargers, etc).
Power supplies and chargers of any kind.
Old cell phones.
Old PDA's (Palm, iPaq, etc)
Old laptops.
Old computers of ANY type, even your old 12 ton mainframe, also racks and support equipment. We have even accepted the donation of an entire NOC once (4 giant truckloads of equipment, racks, and cables).
Vehicles of any kind, from unicycles to locomotives.
Musical instruments of any kind, new or used, working or not.
Any manner of laser and optical equipment.
Medical tools (hemostats, etc), MUST BE CLEAN! If in doubt, autoclave it. They don't need to be sterile, but we won't accept a biohazard. Tubing and such is always useful.