People already like to give to causes they care about, but adding a little extra incentive helps sweeten the deal.
Sponsorships are a necessary part of running a youth sports organization. Sure, you can ask for donations and host countless fundraising events, but the largest chunk of your team’s operating revenue will still come in the form of sponsorships, and it’s easy to see why.
Sponsorships allow locals to show their support for youth sports while also getting their name out there. So, If you want to encourage more people to give to your organization, then you need to find the best way to reach out to them and then be prepared to sell the benefits of giving to youth sports—benefits such as:
- Opening up more opportunities to grow your league through added revenue – more opportunities mean getting more kids to play and develop lifelong friendships
- Teaching leadership skills, teamwork and interpersonal skills
- Boosting self-esteem and improving personal health
There are countless benefits you can use to market the significance of sports and the need for sponsorships, but below are 3 easy ways you can generate more sponsorships across your league.
Reach out to local businesses
A large part of the sponsorships you’re going to get will come from local businesses. If you’re not sure where to start to generate interest around these sponsorships, it’s best to look to your immediate contacts. Reach out to friends, contacts you’ve made in your professional life or parents on individual teams and ask for recommendations on who to contact at local businesses or large corporations in town. This is a good place to start because these are people who know you and the team you represent and some of them are already invested in this league. From there, you can go to these local businesses and present your sponsorship packages or send email inquiries to the person in charge of community outreach.
Contact local community-led organizations
Local civic groups, churches or private clubs are a great place to ask for donations. You may already know these people or leaders of these groups, and it helps to have that connection once you start asking for sponsorships. Many of these organizations have budgets for publicity, though, so you should contact them early in the season to make sure you hear back from them in time and to make sure you get to them before other organizations do.
Offer incentives/Sponsorship tiers
Are you selling banners to line the chain link fence around the field? What about a prominent display on the scoreboard or even across the front of your team’s jersey? Are you giving teams a shout-out over the intercom before the start of the game? You can set up these sponsorship tiers and highlight the benefits of each of these to the people you contact to sell these sponsorships. Having a business’s name prominently displayed in a heavily trafficked area gets more eyeballs on that organization’s logo, so it’s a win-win for everyone
New Feature: Sponsorships
Pickle Juice now has a feature integrated into its registration and payments platform that gives people the ability to view and purchase different membership packages or sponsorship levels.
Through your Pickle Juice account, you can include an image, list the items included in each option available to purchase and more. It’s also super easy to set up and our reporting functions offer admins full transparency into every dollar collected for your program.
All Pickle Juice admins have access to this right now, and if you don’t know how to use it or haven’t yet, we can show you how to make good use of it this season. If you’re looking for a team management platform and want to see a demonstration of this feature, we can also set you up with a demo to show you how it’s done!