GUIDELINES - Important legal/sponsoring guidelines for interdisciplinary projects

1. For who?

2. Hybrid financial structure of MAKE projects

3. Things to know when looking for sponsors

4. Three parties contract templates for sponsors

5. Donation letter for sponsors

6. Specific to IT and softwares providers

7. Prospects forbidden to contact

8. Useful documents to download

This page is concerning student managers and supervisors of MAKE interdisciplinary projects and provides important legal guidelines to consider when managing an interdisciplinary project funded by public money, especially when it comes to engaging with external partnerships.

Before anything else, it is important to understand that MAKE projects have a particular financial structure. These projects are always involving an EPFL laboratory/unit but sometimes they also involve a student association. This associative structure is particularly key when the teams get bigger in order to provide the students with leadership and autonomy.

This hybrid format (academic/associative) is reflected in the financial structure of an interdisciplinary project with two different financial entities:

1. An EPFL fund - under the supervision of the supervising laboratory
2. A bank or postal account - under the supervision of the student association's committee

Each of these funds can be used for different objectives:

1. The EPFL fund can be used for:
   1. Pay for EPFL internal services (professional workshops, reprographie etc..)
   2. Pay for consummables in the makerspaces SPOT and SKIL
   3. Pay for the salary of supervisors and pedagogical related supervision
   4. Receive the support of EPFL via the MAKE fund
   5. Receive the support of important sponsors
2. The association's bank (or postal account) can be used for:
   1. Pay for pizzas and beers (or more generally events for team building, recruitment of new students etc)
   2. Pay for communication related activities - promoting the project via a website communication content
   3. Pay for associtive related matters
   4. Receive the support of small sponsors (less than 7000 chf.-)

The general rules to follow before engaging in a partnership with external institutions:

1. Please avoid contacting the sponsors already supporting the MAKE program (therefore indirectly supporting your project)
2. Use the existing templates for sponsoring (see next chapters)
   1. The three-parties template for important sponsors and to transfer money on the EPFL fund
   2. The donation letter to transfer money on the association's bank account
3. For amount bigger than 7000 chf.- you must use the three parties template and transfer money on the EPFL fund

Download french version Download english version

Download donation letter

For sponsoring related to softwares, you can use similar sponsoring templates as above but it is important to contact the Software Asset Managers (SAM) at EPFL. They will be able to help you to negociate with software providers or potentially provide you with the software you need because EPFL already possesses a licence you can use.

Adresse mail to contact before discussing with private software providers and to include in every ongoing discussions : sam.dsi@epfl.ch

The MAKE program already receives the support

1. Download french version of the three parties contract template
2. Download english version of the three parties contract template
3. Contact to include when discussing with software providers: sam.dsi@epfl.ch