What is the FONtrepreneurs program?
When you join FON you get WiFi anywhere and a share of the revenues generated through your FON Spot. You also become a member of the largest WiFi community in the world, joining with hundreds of thousands of other Foneros in the spirit of WiFi everywhere, for everyone.
The idea behind FONtrepreneurs is to encourage Foneros to help develop the Community in new ways, by targeting high traffic areas or businesses and establishing FON Spots there. In return, FON will give a share of the revenues the Fonero who set up the FON Spot as a “thank you” for the time and effort. Everyone wins, businesses get a simple, low cost WiFi solution, the Fonero gets a bit of extra dinero and new FON Spots light up, allowing Foneros to user their WiFi in more places.
Detailed Program Description
The FONtrepreneurs program is a test project, aiming to refine a set of tools and incentives to help people who are interested in promoting the FON Community and WiFi everywhere. We hope to build this into a flexible enough program to serve anyone from FON enthusiasts to students looking to make a little cash on the side to the community organizations that want to develop neighborhood WiFi projects.
The FONtrepreneurs program is a test to determine the viability of incentives based expansion of the FON Community. What we are trying to determine is what marketing support, incentives and other support from FON will encourage people to promote FON directly in their community to owners of high value locations. This program is intended as a trail and if successful, will serve as the model for a general roll out program.
Our goal is to increase the number of FON Spots in cafes, restaurants, areas frequented by students, and any other public places where people might want Internet access; thus increasing the over all WiFi coverage of the Community. Our hope is to tap into local Fonero’s insights into the best locations for FON Spots in their neck of the woods. Be creative! It doesn’t have to be the neighborhood bar, it can be anywhere people would want WiFi. We would also like to develop a FON Kit that would make muni-WiFi and neighborhood WiFi projects like FON’s ChuecaWiFi and Malaga projects easier for local implementation.
This specific test case involves distributing a FON Kit with three La Foneras, a La Fontenna, stickers, fliers and other marketing materials available to interested Foneros at a subsidized cost. The Fonero then promotes FON to owners of high value locations and establishes the FON Spot. As an incentive to seek out high traffic locations, the Fonero will be given FON’s share of the revenue generated on the FON Spot for the duration of the three month trial.
In addition, at the end of the trial, FON will reimburse the cost of the FON Kit if the three La Foneras have been active for at least 80% of the time during the last eight weeks of the trial. The purpose of this is to determine if this sort of revenue based incentive will actually generate revenue in enough cases to become a useful tool for growing the FON Community. Participants in this program will be encouraged to give FON as much feedback as possible and will be asked to fill in a short survey at the beginning and end of the project.
Incentives Description and Expected Incentives Payouts
Activation
- Re-imbursement of the cost of the FON Kit if all three La Foneras are connected and remain active for the duration of the trial. (To give you time to set them up, we’ll only count the last 8 weeks of the 12 week trial period.)
Connections
- 50% of the revenues generated through the FON Spot.
The financial incentives work as follows. Normally, the owner of a FON Spot – the Bill – gets 50% of the net revenue generated on their FON Spot, and FON gets the remaining 50%. For the duration of this trial, the participant will get FON’s portion of the revenue. This breaks down as follows:
| Paid Connection Type | Revenue Generated (in $ or € as appropriate) |
| One Day Pass | 1.07 |
| Five Day Pass | 3.91 |
| SMS Pass | Varies by country – 0.25 to 0.60 |
| Advertisement | 0.05 |
One and five day passes are the most common, and a successful FON Spot in a high traffic area can generate between 5 and 30 paid connections in a month or more.
For the three month duration of the promotion, the participant will be given a weekly report of connections to their FON Spot and will be paid at the end of every month as long as they have accumulated more than €/$ 30. At the end of the promotion, they will be paid the balance of their revenue, regardless of how much they have generated. Someone who sets up three successful FON Spots can realistically expect to make between €/$ 30 and 60 or more from their FON Spots.
In addition, if all the La Foneras in a specific marketing pack are active at least 80% of the time for the last 8 weeks of the project, the participant will be refunded their initial investment in the FON Kit.
More Detail on the FON Kit
Contents include:
- 3 La Foneras
- 1 La Fontenna
- Extra promo stickers
- Fliers or brochures
- 50 Printed Day Pass Promo Cards
- 1 FON T-shirt
To obtain your FON Kit, FON will send you a promo code that will allow you to access the Kit in the FON Shop. The cost in the Shop will be €50 / $50, although this money will be refunded at the end of the trial if you meet the Pay Back Incentive conditions noted above.
When you order your FONtrepreneurs FON Kit, you can begin promoting FON and distributing your La Foneras immediately and you will receive all the applicable incentives. However, the formal trial period will not begin for a couple of weeks to give us time to get this started.
Reporting
As part of this trial, FON will send you two types of reports for your La Foneras. You will receive a weekly email confirming that we have detected that your La Fonera has been activated, and giving you a breakdown of passes and connections. This report will help you make sure your La Fonera is online and will be useful if you are experimenting with antenna placement.
The second report will be a monthly summary report that will have more detail on the types of paid connections you’ve generated during the month and other information. This will also include a breakdown of the money to date generated through your FON Spot.
In addition to these reports, if you need to contact FON for any additional information, tech support or other issues, a special email address has been created for the participants in this trial: fontrep@fon.com. A representative from FON Operations will be answering these emails during normal Spanish business hours.
Requirements You must be registered as a Bill to participate in this project, and we’ll be using the payment system in place for Bills to pay incentives to participants. If you are currently registered as a Linus, please change your status to Bill. Remember that Bills now have full roaming rights, so you will lose no privileges when becoming a Bill.
When you have opted in by contacting us via email, FON will request your address details and send you a contract to sign. We will also include an addressed stamped envelope for your convenience to send the contract back to us. We have included a copy of the contact for you to review below. If you prefer to print and send us a copy yourself, please indicate this in the email and we will not send you a contract.
When we receive your signed documents, we will send you an email with the access code you will need for ordering your FON Kit and to begin participating in this trial.
