Sponsorship

Guide

This easy-to-follow guide will take you through understanding your value, crafting your proposals, reaching out to potential sponsors, and building lasting partnerships. It’s designed to simplify the sponsorship process, ensuring your club forms valuable connections. Use this guide to help turn sponsorship opportunities into supportive, long-term relationships for your club.

Remember

Sponsorship is not a gift

Sponsors need something measurable in return for their support of your club, beyond their logo on team kits, a sign on the boundary fence or a website link.

Think of sponsorship as a mutually beneficial business collaboration, where both sides exchange value. The sponsorship benefits to clubs are clear. The benefits to sponsors should be just as clear, and must be underpinned by the question, ‘How can our club help our sponsors sell more of their products or services?’ 

Done correctly, the club gains valuable support (financial or in products/services) and the sponsor sees an increase in enquiries or sales directly attributable to their investment. If this is the case, it’s very likely that your sponsors will extend their support in the future.

Sponsorship and marketing

Marketing is simply communicating how an organisation’s products or services meet the wants and needs of potential users of those products and services – the customers.

If you can easily describe the benefits of joining your club to potential members, then you are a marketer!

Sponsorship is a similar principle except that now you are marketing to your members and supporters on behalf of your sponsors. 

Determine value

What benefits are you offering the potential sponsor, and how much are those benefits worth? How much more money could sponsors make if you provided those marketing opportunities to them?

Develop proposals

Tailor your proposal to your sponsor, showing them that you understand their business and products. Avoid tiered sponsorship proposals (e.g. Gold, Silver, etc) as these come across as being less personal. 

Your sponsorship proposal should include:

An Introduction

• A very brief introduction to your club
  • Who you are, what you do, who are your members and supporters
  • Be brief – the sponsor is more interested in what’s in it for them than the details of your club

What are you offering?

• Signage, logos, social media and website promotion
  • While it’s only a part of your marketing of your sponsor, these activities are a simple way to extend your sponsors’ reach to more of your club’s customers
• Media exposure
  • Create opportunities for your sponsors to be seen in media coverage of games, tournaments or club events
• Access to your club network
  • You can’t share personal information from your club member and supporter database with sponsors, but you can distribute promotional materials on their behalf to this database, perhaps as newsletter content.
• Product placement and sampling
  • Invite your sponsors to club events and activities. Being present allows them to directly engage with potential customers and to showcase their products and services.
• Hospitality opportunities
  • Provide your sponsors with VIP tickets to games or special events, allowing them to entertain clients or employees in a unique setting
• Promotional events and activities
  • Invite sponsors to co-host promotional events with your club, such as meet-and-greets with players, awards nights, etc.
• Naming rights
  • Longer term sponsors could be offered game, event or award naming rights.
• Join with your sponsor in supporting community service activities (e.g. charity work or environmental activities such as tree planting days), demonstrating their commitment to supporting local organisations and deepening ties with local communities
• Personal introductions
  • By personally introducing sponsors to members who may be in the market for their products or services you are showing that the sponsor is a trusted colleague worthy of support.
• Exclusivity
  • If your club uses your sponsor’s goods or services, you should enter into exclusivity arrangements with them in recognition of your partnership
  • If you make such an agreement ensure there’s a clause to allow for exceptions in cases where the club is contractually bound to seek alternative quotes, for example for grants.

Details

• What is the cost to the sponsor?
• How long is the sponsorship for?
• What will the club do for the sponsor during this period?
• How will you measure and report on the benefits the sponsor receives?

Sell the proposal

Think about local businesses, but larger businesses may also have sponsorship programs that would be appropriate. 

Present the proposal in person to the people who can make the decision to sponsor your club. 

Remember that you are offering opportunities for sponsors to sell more. Be well prepared and able to respond well to any of your prospective sponsor’s likely questions. Most importantly, follow up after the meeting to thank them for their time and provide any required additional information.

When negotiating a sponsorship deal be very clear which arrangements are fixed and which can be changed. Most importantly, be clear that any change up or down in sponsorship value will result in a change in what your club will provide – don’t undervalue what you offer.

Enter a Contract

Enter into a formal contract with the sponsor, clearly setting out their investment and what you will do for them. Include a timeframe for the arrangement.

Deliver

It is imperative that you deliver and communicate what you have promised to your sponsor and ensure that they receive value from the sponsorship.

Did you know? Keeping a sponsor is much easier than replacing one.

Ways to do this include:

• Details of how you measured the success of the sponsorship (e.g. members checking in on social media when purchasing from the sponsor)
• Statistics – how much business did you drive to the sponsor?
• Thank you letters or certificates of appreciation
• Newsletters, social media mentions or press clippings showing recognition of the sponsor
• Regular written reports
• Speak to your sponsors personally at least monthly 
• Invite sponsors to special events
• Support sponsors where appropriate (e.g. exclusive purchasing arrangements)
• Negotiate continuing sponsorship prior to the expiry of the existing relationship

Re-sign or resign

Assuming all goes well for both parties, begin negotiations to extend the arrangement before it concludes. If not, close out the arrangement and remove all relevant signs, logos and so on. Then review the relationship and identify any lessons that can be applied to future sponsorship deals.