While our company currently has no events lined up for the period I am around. I have been very fortunate to be exposed to part of public relations that I’ve never seen before.
In the past whenever we did our campaign proposals, we always used to take it that the sponsors we proposed to work with would be willing to work with us.
In real life, I found out it was nothing like that.
For one of our clients (a cosmetics line), we were faced with the issue of sourcing for and reaching out to sponsers who would want to work with the brand on a series of publicity roadshows.
Before we started approaching potential sponsors, we had keep a few factors in mind. We wanted to reach out to sponsors who had products with the same country as origin as our client, the products offered needed to be mid-high range in price, like our client’s cosmetics and the sponsor’s products had to appeal to the same target audience.
Often a potential partner could not fulfill all the factors mentioned and after intensive research we managed to create a list of 3 or 4 potential sponsors we would contact.
I was initially very nervous about this as I had never done anything like this before. Getting sponsors on board would require a fair amount of persuasion (and even a bit of selling), something I was not sure I could do.
Luckily for me, my Director was there to guide me. His advice to me was to think like the partner I was approaching and figure out what their needs would be. From there, I could craft my correspondence based on how working with our client could help meet these needs.
In the end, we managed to get 2 potential sponsors who were interested to work with our client. A visit to one of our potential partner’s business location revealed that they had winded up business a while ago and the other shortlisted candidate was uninterested.
While this is probably not the most desirable result, it was a great learning experience for me.
Has anyone else had to approach sponsors or looked for sponsorships for their clients? What was your experience like?
Here’s also a good article on how to approach getting sponsorships:
1 comment:
From working at my PR internship at the Art Gallery of Western Australia I found sponsorship is so signficant,as the Art Gallery relies heavily on sponsorshi, this created an interesting experience for me.
I found a good point in maintaining and recruiting sponsorship is to firstly understand your organisations values and themes. So you can adapt that into companys that hold the same values and themes building a stronger alliance in the long run. I would also secondly look into other organisations that are similar to your company and research into who are there sponsors, just to gain some awareness and would help if they were your comeptition.
Another interesting point I found from working in an organisation that heavily relied on sponsorship was that most of our sponsors had a central theme towards who they selected to be apart of their philanthopic area.
An example of this was Woodside a mining company who sponsored the Art Gallery of WA. They also had a theme of organisations they sponsored, which was technology, experiments, art/sport based industries,they sposnored scitech a child-fun technology experiment ogranisation they also sponsored the Australian ballet company and a well known fottbal club the dockers.
I feel overall it is important to have an understanding of sponsorship, and how it works, sponsorhsip does more these days than just provide funding it contributes to upholding many of the company's values and maintaining credibiltiy in some cases.
Good job in recruiting sponsorship for your first time!!
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