With budget constraints being one of the key challenges fundraisers face, many charities are expanding their revenue streams to sustain their missions. Chief among those are corporate sponsorships, which empower charities to attain additional funds and foster long-term relationships with businesses and corporations.
Whether you’re seeking additional funds to power a 5K fundraiser or gauging support for your upcoming capital campaign, corporate sponsorships are a great way to attain that support. Let’s take a quick look at the steps and best practices for securing a sponsorship for your charity.
Understand the Types of Corporate Sponsorships
When fundraisers think of corporate sponsorships, they often think of businesses providing financial support to help charities execute a fundraising event idea. While event sponsorships are a key example, they are just one of many ways businesses can collaborate with charities.
Here are a few other common types of sponsorships:
- Financial: This is the most popular type of sponsorship, where a business offers monetary support to a charity.
- In-kind: The business provides in-kind donations, usually goods or services.
- Media: The business supports the charity through marketing or advertisements.
- Product: The business offers its products to be used or distributed during a charity event or program.
- Program: This is a longer-term partnership where the business sponsors an ongoing charity program or campaign, providing multiple types of support.
Now that you understand the different types of sponsorships, you can request the ones that make the most sense for your charity and potential partners. For example, if you plan on hosting a gala, request a product sponsorship from your local winery if you know they have overstocked vintages.
Identify the Best Corporate Sponsorship Prospects
Finding businesses to request sponsorships from can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, charities don’t need to contact every local business or big corporation they can think of to acquire partnerships. Start by narrowing your sponsorship prospects to the organisations most likely to support your charity.
Look for businesses that:
- Have similar values to your charity
- Operate in your local community
- Work in a similar vertical or industry
- Share target audiences with your charity
- Have a history of corporate philanthropy, which 360MatchPro defines as “voluntary activities or investments in the betterment of society”
Especially if you are a small charity leader, reaching out to your network can prove invaluable in the search for sponsorship prospects. Connect with other fundraisers to discuss businesses they’ve successfully partnered with. Or, ask them to refer you to business owners or executives interested in working with charities.
Set Yourself Up as a Great Sponsorship Candidate
To establish yourself as a reliable sponsorship candidate, you must first understand what businesses get from these partnerships. Generally, their benefits include:
- Access to new or bigger audiences. Businesses can tap into your charity’s audience to increase brand awareness and reach potential new customers.
- Improved reputation. With 77% of consumers wanting to purchase from companies with corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, sponsorships allow businesses to boost their reputations and differentiate themselves from competitors.
- Networking opportunities. Sponsorships usually include networking opportunities with VIPs such as major donors and other key business individuals, which can lead to additional partnerships for your sponsor.
- Heightened employee engagement. Paul Polman’s employee engagement report shows that 66% of U.K. workers and 76% of U.S. employees want to work for companies that positively impact the world. Sponsoring charities shows job applicants that the business is committed to improving the world.
- Tax benefits. Sponsorships usually qualify as charitable donations, resulting in potentially significant tax deductions for the business.
Based on these benefits, make the necessary operational changes that position your charity as a great candidate for sponsorship. For example, you should:
- Develop a strong mission statement that clearly defines your charity’s work.
- Ensure your promotional materials are professional and up-to-date to show how your organisation might market your sponsor.
- Prepare compelling stories about donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries to reinforce your mission’s value.
- Organise your data to qualitatively show your charity’s impact, marketing capabilities, and more.
It’s good to do a baseline preparation that generally sets up your charity to secure sponsorships. However, you’ll likely come across a sponsor who may have different needs unmet by the activities above. In that case, you’ll need to do additional work to demonstrate your value as a partner.
Send Tailored Sponsorship Proposals
Just as you would personalise event experiences to your target audience, you must also personalise your sponsorship proposals to individual businesses. Thoroughly research each business, honing in on its needs and target audience.
Then, in your proposal, highlight:
- Specific sponsorship opportunities. Lay out several specific sponsorship opportunities they’d be most interested in. For example, if your aquarium is trying to acquire a sponsor with a specific interest in ocean fish, highlight your research program on whale sharks or the recently discovered papillated redbait.
- Discuss the value of their support for your charity. Beyond personal gain, many businesses genuinely want to impact their communities positively. Suppose you want to add excitement to your annual walkathon, which generates a significant portion of your charity’s annual income. You could explore creative ideas, such as organising a shoe drive fundraiser or selling t-shirts, as suggested in this Funds2Orgs walkathon guide. Then, convey to potential sponsors how their support will directly enable these innovations, emphasising their role in furthering your mission.
- Highlight the benefits they’ll receive. Create sponsorship tiers that outline the perks a sponsor will receive in exchange for a set amount of funds. For example, $2,500 might get a sponsor a dedicated space on your charity’s sponsorship webpage, a social media announcement, and an email newsletter mention. On top of that, highlight the more specific benefits for the sponsor, such as access to your charity’s audience of over 10,000 email subscribers.
Incorporate compelling visuals, stories, data, and other relevant information that might pique the sponsor’s interest. For example, if the sponsor is interested in working with charities that aid students in need, bring up the results of your recent program aimed at delivering school supplies to underprivileged students.
Additionally, include your contact information and follow-up communication plan in your proposal. This makes it easy for sponsors to reach out to you and gives them an idea of what messages to expect from your charity in the upcoming days.
After a business indicates its interest in the sponsorship you’re offering, it’s time to negotiate the specifics of the partnership and execute the plan. Don’t forget that your relationship doesn’t end after you’ve received the business’s support. With the right approach to stewardship and engagement, you can build a mutually beneficial relationship that lasts for years.
