S.

Sponsorship: How To Get My Money

By In Sponsorships, Startups

Getting a sponsorship isn’t THAT difficult. Over the last three years, I’ve sponsored a large number of local, national, and international events. My company mainly sponsors causes that are close to my heart as well as my business. This means startup community events, tech competitions, mobile app development conferences, etc. The problem is that the types of requests I’ve received from organizations have been so unbelievably poor that I’ve turned some of the requesters into whimpering piles of PTSD. I’m not a mean person by nature. If you’re going to ask me for money, please put a little time and professionalism into your request. I know that most of the people that are forced to handle these requests can be a little green, but an ounce of training, or a decent template, could go a long way to settling my annoyance.

So, here are a few tips based on some of the most egregious faux pas I’ve had to deal with.

1 .Start with the people or companies that gave last time

I’m not sure why, but I’ve heard a number of times something similar to this:

“Well, I didn’t contact you first, because you were really generous last year, and I didn’t want to bother you.”

That’s so unreasonable, I cannot begin to imagine the mindset. This can only come from eating too many crayons as a child. The entire value proposition to a company in sponsoring an event or institution is marketing exposure. Yes, you give to the events and organizations you believe in, and there is a feel-good charity aspect as well. But all the feel-good reasons in the world are not going to get anything but the largest companies to sponsor you. This is an advertising play. The deal is simple: I want exposure, you are offering exposure. You’re not bothering me by giving me the offer to promote my business.

The second thing to remember here is that no one likes to be picked last. I have had a number of organizations contact me with my other pet peeve:

“Hey there, I know you were one of our main sponsorship partners last year, and I wanted to know if you could help out. We’re only $X away from meeting our goal, and I was hoping you could help us cross that finish line.”

Are they suggesting that the only reason we’re getting the offer is because they didn’t get enough money from their first choices? Am I to understand that you’re scraping the bottom of your funding barrel with your email? No thanks.

2. Ask your sponsors to participate

Most of the types of events that I sponsor in the tech world have some sort of support role needs. These are things like being a mentor for young entrepreneurs, being a judge in a startup competition, or possibly being a guest speaker. What’s nice about this is it’s a little extra exposure; something your marketing people can write about how awesome their CEO is for helping out the little guy.

Other than the ego stroke, it is also really rewarding to help out. I feel good when I get to pass on some of the lessons I’ve learnt the hard way. I feel even better when I can steer someone into a new way of thinking that they had never considered.

Unfortunately here’s what happens: I show up at an event to which we’re the premier sponsor, and the list of mentors, judges, or dishwashers includes a list of people who didn’t actually shell out cash, listed on the event’s website (usually above our company’s logo). Not to mention that I’m not sitting at an event, which I paid a lot of money for, and I’m not doing anything. I’m not a participant. I’m not a mentor, judge, or dog walker. What am I supposed to do? Write blog posts?

Get your sponsors involved. If they’ve got the cash to fund your event, they might know a little bit about whatever it is you’re doing and can help.

3. Don’t treat the offer to sponsor as a Noble Prize nomination

Here is another gem of an email I’ve gotten:

“Hey Greg, I’ve attached a document here to our event. It’s going to be huge, and I wanted to see if you would like to get in on this.”

The document you attached is targeted toward the attendees, not potential sponsors. It tells me nothing about how much money you’re looking for (I assume you’re looking for money, but I can’t tell from your email…), or what my money will go to, how it can help you, and what exposure I will get in return.

Look, I don’t need to be buttered-up to strike a check, but for heaven’s sake, there are wiki-how articles on this stuff. Due to the last five or poor sponsorship requests, I’ve gotten I’ve changed my sponsorship policy: If you’re looking for $100 or for me to buy your homemade cookies, this is fine. If you’re looking for $10k, then you probably need to show a level of professionalism that is a little more than “this is going to be huge — let me know if you want in.”

Look, this isn’t the worst request I’ve gotten (which is embarrassing to say the least), but it’s pretty bad. Maybe you have so much money coming in that you really don’t care. Or, as you imply, the event is so big that you have sponsors fighting over those last two spots like rabid Black Fridayers. But if either were the case, it would leave a bad taste in my mouth for the next time you came to ask for money.

This is a sales call. You want me to give you a sponsorship for something in return. Something as simple as, “We would love for you to be a sponsor” would go a long to preventing your evisceration.

4. Personalize your pitch

See above point. Don’t just attach the document you’re sending out to attendees. Make the offer about me.

I have had those emails to the masses just copied and pasted to me. The last guy who sent me something got a fairly unprofessional response from me (something I regret!) His implication was, “Hit me up if you think this is cool” which I don’t see working for anyone outside of high school.

Put my logo into the sponsorship document, mention how it will benefit us, talk about our companies previous events… anything. I’ve dropped huge sums on people who have actually mocked up what a stage will look like with our logo embossed over it, and I felt great about it. A little effort goes a long way.

Let me know exactly what you’re looking for; how much money, time, and anything else. Tell me what you think the benefits to sponsoring the event will be.

5. Call me for that sponsorship

This is somehow not obvious to people. I understand an email is easy, but this is a sale. Basic sales etiquette should apply. Pick up the phone, call me, and tell me you’re going to be sending me an email to follow up. Even better, email me asking me for a call or a meeting! The sponsorship is as good as yours.

6. Make good on your promises

I recently sponsored a gala at my alma mater, for the third year in a row. I’m a got a nice award from them one year. Why wouldn’t I sponsor? Well, last year their pitch was pretty good. They promised that our logo would be smeared over every wall and digital display, there would be a kind “thank you” on stage for our few dollars of assistance, we would have a full-page ad in the event booklet, and we’d receive some social media recognition. Not bad for a few thousand bucks.

What did we get? Not even a mention.

Every screen was blank, no one said a word on stage, and there wasn’t even an event booklet. To add insult to injury, we didn’t even get an apology after the fact, let alone a thank you email. So this is called a scam. This year I declined to sponsor, even though I believe in the cause. It’ll probably take me a year or so to stop being so angry. They might be able to get something out of me again in the future. Right now though, I’m just angry.

Don’t be like these people.

Try taking a look at PRHelper or Spark Templates for some examples of how to write a sponsorship letter. Or even that SEO dreamers Wikihow’s version. There is honestly no excuse to mess this up.

Previous ArticleNext Article
I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of judo, squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

Leave a Reply

The Product Is Bait

In Entrepreneurship, Startups

You Don’t Know Yet

Founders don’t know what problem they’re solving yet, and neither do any of their customers, and the annoying part is that this is not actually bad news, because if you stay in it long enough, you will eventually figure it out.

The Product Is Bait

The way it usually goes is this: You build something that takes a particular angle on a particular problem in a particular industry (probably one you know pretty well, or think you do), and one of two things happens. You either get sucked into a kind of product development haunted house where it has to be just a little more complete before it’s ready, and the dashboard needs better onboarding, and what if it had a Slack integration, and maybe the logo should feel more “enterprise” (I have never once heard a satisfying definition of what “enterprise” means as an aesthetic), or you get a version out the door and into the actual market, where it doesn’t sell. Not selling is, counterintuitively, on ok outcome. It won’t feel good, it’ll feel like capitalism personally singled you out for a lesson, but what you have now is a real artifact that maybe 1% of your original intended market can react to, and that 1% is enormously valuable because real reactions are the only raw material that matters. You can now take that product (which is bait, more than anything else) and you start showing it to ten, twenty, thirty potential customers, watching their faces and listening to what they complain about.

Feature-Requested to Death

At first, they will try to feature-request you to death. These requests will feel very convincing because customers say things like “if it could just hook up to our QuickBooks instance, I’d buy it tomorrow” or “if the AI could handle this last piece of the workflow, this would be an absolute game-changer for us” (they will ALWAYS ask if it can export to Excel, a request I believe predates the spreadsheet and may outlast the species). So you go back to your team, you build as fast as you can, you ship version two with all the new features, you go back to those same customers, and if you are good, AND lucky they will tell you the exact same thing: there are just one or two more features they really need, and then this thing will fix the problem once and for all, and you are almost there.

The Roadmap Graveyard

I’m going to pause the loop here because it can go on for twenty iterations (and I’ve seen it go longer). The real tragedy is that a lot of founders never even get this far, because their demo customers have them trapped in feature-development purgatory forever… or their own brains trap them there, because the product has to be perfect before any real human is allowed to see it. Those products die in roadmaps and “just one more thing” conversations, and never get rejected by the market because they never actually reach it.

Eventually, You Start Seeing the Elephant

But if you can stay in the conversation long enough, past the feature requests and the individual customers and the literal words people are saying to you, something strange starts to happen. You become, through sheer accumulated exposure, the world’s leading expert on the problem your customers all have in common. Not the problem you thought you were solving when you started, and not the problem any one of them has described to you, but the actual structural problem that everyone is bumping into from different directions (Schlep Blindess) without being able to name it, because nobody has a view of the whole thing. One customer tells you it’s the accounting system. Another says it’s logistics. A third says the two systems don’t talk to each other. A fourth blames someone named Susan in operations (this may or may not be fair to Susan… but yeah, wtf Susan?) Each of them is holding a piece of the elephant, the trunk or the tail or the foot, and describing it with complete sincerity, and they are all correct about their piece, and none of them can see the animal.

You, Neo, Are The One!

You are the only person who has talked to all of them, which means you are the only person positioned to eventually see the whole thing. The insight doesn’t come in a meeting and it doesn’t come from a good customer interview; it comes sideways, usually while you’re not looking for it. You’re at lunch with a client and one of their direct reports walks in with a quick question, and two people start having a conversation right in front of you, and the boss asks why the system can’t do something, and the user explains the workaround, and a third person adds “we only do it that way because finance needs the numbers by Thursday,” and a piece clicks, and then another, and then another. You suddenly understand that the product you built wasn’t the product at all; it was the thing that got you close enough to understand what the actual product should be, which turns out to be a considerably more interesting thing to build.

Earning the Right to Understand

The first version won’t be right, and the second version probably won’t be right either, and that is not failure… that is the process of earning the right to understand what you’re actually building (see Paul Graham’s “How to Get Startup Ideas“). Most founders want to skip straight to the insight, want the clean customer discovery process and the tidy MVP and the market telling them in bullet points exactly what to build, and that is just not how it works. You build the wrong thing, you launch it, you survive, you talk to as many customers as you can stand, you resist becoming a short-order cook for every prospect with a credit card, and you keep looking for the pattern underneath all the noise until eventually you see the elephant.

That’s when the real company starts.