For this purpose, the only thing better is if we could somehow get them to mention Microsoft everywhere they mention Haskell. Any actual explaining would just get in the way :)
Doesn't quite work without explaining, because one would have to be very careful not to mis-represent financial support by some as endorsement by the whole; but if one were to ask those who have contributed financially to Haskell development in some form or other for their permissions, one could make quite an interesting little list (not to mention the vastly larger list of people who have contributed their time, efforts, and ideas). There have been occasional discussions of language-specific or FP-in-general industry consortiums. Perhaps the simpler form of "Haskell sponsorship" with mutual bragging rights for haskell.org and sponsor could be a seed corn for such organisations. These days, being associated with FP is no longer something that needs explaining, let alone defending, so sponsors could get something out of their contribution, such as cute little logos, tea-cups and t-shirts (apart from the prime motive of better Haskell;-). Imagine all the students that universities could attract by being a "Haskell campus", not just turning out "Haskell engineers", but "supporting Haskell development" by contributing staff time. Imagine all the competent developers and major customers companies could attract by being a "Haskell sponsor", being actively involved in "Haskell frontline development&research". Imagine all those pretty Haskell logos on all those webpages. oops, wrong universe again;-) Claus PS. Of course, if you do go down that route, your next Haskell job in industry might be representing your company on a committee to decide the internationalization of an XML-based interchange format for unicode lambda characters, with the usual sub-committees for upper-, lower-, and othercase variants, each with at least two spin-off standards representing minority preferences or implementors' we-just-did-it decisions. So be careful what you wish for.