If you are a coach or parent looking to find a sponsor for your sports team, you are in the right place.
Finding a sponsor for your sports team to cover the costs of equipment, travel or even camp costs is not as hard as it might seem at first. There are key steps that you can take to improve your chances to get sponsored.
Let's start with the basics:
WHAT IS A SPONSORSHIP FOR SPORTS TEAMS?
A sponsorship for your sports team is a way for a corporation to get involved in the local sports community. With the help of a company, organization or corporation, a sports team is able to afford some of the investments that are necessary in order to accomplish their goals.
Sports teams, at all levels and ages, are an important social activity that keeps kids away from trouble and teaches them basic teamwork, hard work, physical fitness and general social skills. However, in order to make a successful sports it does require some financial investments. Unfortunately, not all parents can afford this extra financial load.
Finding a sponsor for your sports team to cover the costs of equipment, travel or even camp costs is not as hard as it might seem at first. There are key steps that you can take to improve your chances to get sponsored.
1. SET UP A CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN
The is the fastest and easiest way to find sponsors for your team. Your online campaign will not only bring individual monetary sponsorship it can also capture monetary sponsorship.
A crowdfunding campaign is a great way to spread your message online and get as much reach as possible. This is because of the limited time that you have to raise the funds you need. The urgency created motivates your online peers to share your team campaign to their community.
You can also leverage this exposure to say thank you to your old sponsors. Give them exposure will help you get even more sponsors.
Here are some examples of teams who are working with sponsors on TeamBoost :
- University of Quebec Cheer squad raised more than 27,000$ from almost 1,000 individual sponsors
- College Andre-Laurendeau female hockey team raised more than 10,000$ from nearly 300 individual sponsors. They were working with these sponsors:
You can setup your campaign by clicking here or by leaving us a message on
!
2. WORK AS A TEAM TO ACQUIRE A CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP
Acquiring a sponsor is so much easier if it is done in a team. When you are alone trying to find and secure a sponsor for your equipment, travel or such expenses, the task seems daunting.
However, if the team gathers together to tackle this challenge, it becomes a lot more feasible. As the coach or the parent responsible for sponsorship, it is your responsibility to gather the parents and coaches together and assign responsibilities.
3. WHAT CAN YOU OFFER A COMPANY IN EXCHANGE FOR THEIR SPONSORSHIP?
Sponsorship is not just about what you can get from the company. It is about what you can offer. Here is a list of things that teams can offer to their sponsors:
- Logo on equipment or jersey
- Logo on website or FanPage - this is important especially for a web-based company that is looking to increase their ranking on search engines.
- Social media exposure
Brainstorm a list of things that your team can offer a corporate sponsor. Starting with this, you will have leverage on what you can offer and you'll be more likely to reach out.
4. HOW CAN EACH PERSON CONTRIBUTE TO ACQUIRING A CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP FOR YOUR SPORTS TEAM?
As the person in charge of acquiring a sponsor for the sports team, it is your job to find our what each parent can bring to the table to make this happen. After inquiring each parent about what they can do to bring a sponsor, you'll need to allocate the mission to them and follow up. To make sure they complete their mission ask frequently what you can do to help them. For example, each parent should be able to name one or two potential sponsors. Below are some examples of tasks that can be allocated among the parents:
- 2-3 potential sponsors
- A parent with writing skills should be in charge of writing the sponsorship proposal
- A parent with contacts in the media, should be able to get an advertisement going
- A parent with contacts in graphic design should create a nice looking sponsorship proposal.
Next, you should brainstorm a list of local sponsors that would be a good match for your team. Not every company is going to be a good match. What is a good match? It is a scenario that both the company and the team are benefiting from the partnership. Here is a list of local companies that might benefit from your sponsorship
- Local restaurant or diner - promise to have dinners there post winning games
- Local sports gear store
- Local law or accounting firm - this is great to get the business of the parents in the team
- A local t-shirt logo printing company - this will help them get all the other teams who are looking to get sponsors.
5. TRY TO REACH OUT TO SOME OF THESE SPONSORS:
To help you get started with acquiring a sponsor for your sports team, we've done some research and came up with some sponsors that you can reach out today. Also, you can search online for sponsors that are specific to your area to increase the chances of acquiring them.
- ScotiaBank Sports team Sponsorsip
- Boston Pizza Foundation Sponsorship requests
- Canadian Tire sports team sponsorship request
- Purolator sports sponsorship for teams
6. GET STARTED WITH THIS SAMPLE SPONSORSHIP LETTER
Here is a sample sponsorship request letter. Make sure to modify it to suit your sports team sponsorship request.
{Name of Individual}
{Name of Corporation}
{Corporation Address}
Subject: Sponsorship Request for {Sports Team Name},
Dear {name of Individual},
I am emailing you on the behalf of {name of club}. Our sports team is a collective of young athlete with full of potential. The coaches, parents and administrators are working hard to make sure that each kid is included in all the activities pertaining to the sports club. This is to ensure that these young athletes benefit as much as possible from the lessons of teamwork, dedication and healthy habits.
We are an ambitious team who strives to push the athletes to reach their athletic and personal potential. However, it is the case that not every athlete's family is able to afford to participate in the activates of the team. There are costs associated with equipment, travel, training facilities and even medical expenses. This is the reason for this email. We believe that with the help of your organization, our club will be able to ensure that every athlete is able to not only participate but thrive at the high performance atmosphere.
I believe that our club has a lot to offer to your organization in return of your sponsorship
{Item 1 that you can offer, ie. social media exposure}
{Item 2 that you can offer, ie. logo on the jersey}
{Item 3 that you can offer, ie. link on a website}
We are also open to any suggestions you may have in regards to making a sponsorship work for both of us.
In return we are looking for any of the following things. Each of them will be helpful for us to both cut costs and help our athletes
{Item 1 that they can offer, ie. financial sponsorship}
{Item 2 that they can offer, ie. venue to host events or dinners}
{Item 3 that they can offer, ie. items that can be auctioned off}
We are open for collaboration on various levels, if you have any requests or any ideas on how we can help each other please don't hesitate to let us know.
Thank you for taking the time to read our corporate sponsorship request for our sports team, we look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
(Your Name and Signature)
This is an example of a sponsorship request that can be emailed as well as handed out to managers of companies. We highly recommend to make modifications to this letter to make it suitable for your sports team. Lastly, we also recommend to add a picture of the team in order to give a visual to the person reading the sponsorship request.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Well, we've gone over, what a corporate sponsorship is and we've covered the best strategy to getting your sports team sponsored: working together with the parents. It only makes sense to leverage the connections and contacts that each parent has to acquire that corporate sponsor. Lastly, we provided your with a list of companies that sponsor sports teams as well as provided you with an example of a sponsorship request letter. In this blog post, you have almost everything you need to acquire a sponsorship for your sports team. The next steps would be to implement the plan, put the items discussed here in action and secure that sponsorship.
If you have comments or suggestions regarding this blog or any other ideas on how to get a sponsor for your sports team, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below.