What you sell

Slot types are your inventory: the named placements a sponsor can buy, each with a description and a normal price. Everything else in sponsorship is built from them. The date grid gets a column per type, your sponsor page gets a line per type, and a sponsorship slot on a particular date is one type plus one date.

None of this has to be set up before you can send. Sponsorship sits waiting until you want it, and a newsletter that never sells anything never has to look at it.

The two you start with

Issue Mint seeds two slot types the first time you open the Sponsorship screen for a newsletter, so the grid is never an empty page with nothing to do on it.

One is a sponsored link, priced at 150, described as a link with your own copy placed near the top of the issue and labelled as sponsored. The other is a sponsored banner at 300, described as a full-width image above the links with your own alt text and destination. Both prices are in whatever currency you have chosen, and both types are ordinary rows: rename them, re-price them, rewrite the descriptions, or delete them.

What a slot type is made of

A slot type carries five things, and each of them shows up somewhere a sponsor or you can see.

• A name, up to 80 characters. It heads the column in your grid, names the placement on your sponsor page, and is what appears in your calendar file.
• A description, up to 500 characters. This is the sales copy, and the only part of a slot type written for the sponsor rather than for you.
• A default price, entered in whole units.
• Takes an image, the flag that makes it a banner.
• Offer it on new dates, which is what takes it in and out of circulation.

The flag that makes it a banner

Ticking “takes an image” tells the composer to ask for artwork rather than for copy. Nothing else about the slot type changes.

When a banner booking reaches an issue, the sponsored item offers an upload instead of a headline: PNG, JPG or WEBP up to 2 MB, with alt text up to 250 characters. SVG is refused, because mail clients do not render it. The image then runs the full width of the issue where an ordinary sponsored item would have shown a title and a source. Untick the flag and the same booking becomes a labelled link with your own line of copy under it, which is covered in putting a sponsor into an issue.

Default prices, and the currency they are in

The default price prefills every new date built from that type, so you only retype a figure where a particular issue is worth more or less than usual.

Prices are shown in the sponsorship currency you pick in Settings, on the Website tab: pounds, US dollars, euros, or Canadian, Australian or New Zealand dollars. It is a display choice. Switching it relabels the figures you have already entered rather than converting them, so check the grid afterwards if you switch. It is also not the currency Issue Mint bills you in, which is set out on the pricing page and has nothing to do with what you charge a sponsor.

Turning one off

Unticking “offer it on new dates” stops a slot type being sold without disturbing anything already sold.

The type stays in your list, marked as not offered. It disappears from your public sponsor page, no new dates are built from it, and the dated rows it already produced stay in the grid for your records. Tick it again and Issue Mint fills in the dates it missed straight away, rather than waiting for the weekly refresh.

Deleting one

Deleting a slot type deletes every date built from it, which is why Issue Mint asks you to confirm and names the type in the question.

It refuses outright while anything is booked against that type, because the deletion would take a paying sponsor’s placement with it. The message says to turn the type off instead, which leaves its dates where they are and stops it being offered.

Nobody pays through Issue Mint

Issue Mint records what you sell and never charges anybody for it. There is no checkout on your sponsor page, no payment step in an enquiry, and no commission.

You agree the details with the sponsor and invoice them yourself, which is the arrangement described in how sponsorship management works. Your sponsor page says as much in plain words underneath the form, so a sponsor cannot come away believing a booking has been paid for.