Sponsorship Tips: The Proposal

A section of the show is totally devoted to auto racing.  This is an excellent way to deliver exposure for your potential sponsor.  An appearance with your race car at the customer’s place of business is also an excellent benefit to the sponsor.  Race cars are great way to attract attention.  Your race car might be the drawl that brings a potential patron to your sponsor’s place of business.  Although I hope to devote a whole article to electronic media, for this article let it suffice to say that if you are going after a sponsor at the very least you need a webpage where you can display their logo and a link over to their site.  You should also consider social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as opportunities to pull people to your site and garner additional exposure for your sponsors.  The bottom line is that you need to understand how you will bring benefit to the potential sponsor and clearly communicate it in your proposal. 

Cost – The next logical question the potential sponsor might ask after understanding the benefits of sponsorship is ‘what will it cost me?’  Provide information on the cost of the different sponsorship packages available.  Be specific about what they can expect for each level of sponsorship.  For instance you might offer a package for $100 that gets a 8 inch x 8 inch area on the wing of your car and side of your trailer, but offer a $2000 package that gets a larger more prominent spot on both your race car and trailer as well as a 2 personal appearances at their business.  Having clearly defined packages outlined in your proposal gives you credibility.  It positions you as a business…not just a racer looking to get whatever money they are willing to shell out. 

Contact Page – Be sure to include a page that outlines the best method to contact you.  Include all of your pertinent contact information including address, cell phone, home phone, e-mail address, website address, etc.  Don’t fool yourself into believing that the fact that you put down this information means they are going to call you and offer to give you money (we’ll cover more about soliciting sponsorship in a future article).  Again the goal of including your contact information is to present yourself as professional, buttoned up effort that is worthy of their advertising dollars.

There is nothing more difficult that looking for sponsors.  Don’t sabotage your sponsorship search before you get started by delivering a proposal that is sloppy, poorly organized or lacks visual impact.  Click here for an example of a proposal we created for a local dirt late model team.  Although it is not perfect, it includes many of the elements mentioned above and has been successful in soliciting sponsorship.  We’ll be back next month with more ideas on delivering value to potential sponsors.