3 Different Ways to Create Sponsorship Packages

As your team grows and expands, it’s only natural that your expenses go up. As such, you’ll inevitably find yourself tasked with the duty of finding a sponsor for your team. If you follow our blog, you know we’ve written about quite a few topics related to team sponsorship. In this article, we want to show you practical ways of creating and structuring your sponsorship packages. Let’s dive right in!

3 Ways to Create Sponsorship Packages

There are plenty of ways to create an attractive sponsorship package for your team. In this post, we will explain the 3 most common ways sports teams structure their sponsorship packages and cover the pros and cons of each.

Tiered Sponsorship Packages

Tiered sponsorship packages are the most common type of sponsorship offered. For this package, you need to create several levels that offer more and more benefits with each sponsorship level.

You can keep it simple and create three levels or go higher and create 4 or 5 levels of sponsorship, depending on the size of your team, your fan base, and the perks you can offer. Perks can include advertising space on your site, promotion to your email list/social media following, a banner on your grounds or stadium, a logo on the team’s jersey or other signage, and more. You can charge an ongoing yearly or monthly fee.

Pros of tiered sponsorship packages:

• You can offer a package tailored to the size and financial ability of the potential sponsor.
• A successful sponsor relationship can provide ongoing financial support for your team.

Cons of tiered sponsorship packages:

• You will inevitably run into businesses that don’t have a large budget but would like and could benefit from perks offered in higher-priced package levels.
• Creating the right balance between different package levels can be tricky.

Kawana Football Club offers several tiered packages that not only include different perks but also require sponsors to sign a 3-year sponsorship agreement.

Event Sponsorships

With event sponsorships, you are offering potential sponsors a chance to be promoted during a particular event if they decide to sponsor it. You can create a single package for the most popular event of the season that regularly has sold out seats and high attendance. You can offer them an advertising spot on the stadium banner, an announcement during the break, as well as some of the perks mentioned above such as their logo on your team’s jersey or other signage.

Even though it’s common to offer a single price for this type of package, you can create different levels here to accommodate different budgets. An example would include a high visibility match coupled with fewer perks or a smaller event with more perks.

Event sponsorship pros:

• High visibility matches that happen during the peak of the season or are guaranteed to have high attendance and media coverage can be an incredibly tempting and rewarding offer for potential sponsors.

Event sponsorship cons:

• One-time fee may not be enough to cover your team’s financial needs.

As you can see from the screenshot below, Drogheda United offers two tiers of event sponsorship with added benefits.

Donations

Lastly, you can also decide to put the ball in your sponsor’s court and ask for donations instead of an ongoing sponsorship fee. While some might feel that with donations, there is no control over the actual amount of money received, you can ask for a specific donation amount. That donation amount dictates the number of benefits they receive. Alternatively, you could ask for donations in equipment.

Donation pros:

• Similar to tiered packages, donations can be structured to carry a number of different perks depending on the donation amount.
• Businesses might be more inclined to make a one-time donation instead of agreeing to an ongoing fee.
• You don’t have to ask for monetary goods exclusively.

Donation cons:

• Gathering a sufficient amount of donations requires you to approach more businesses than with a sponsorship package.
• Asking the same business or company for a donation more than a couple of times can come off as annoying.

Bay Street Hoops in the example below use donations as one of their sponsorship packages.

Which Package Structure Should You Use

You might be wondering which structure you should choose. Each of the packages below has its own set of pros and cons. Use them as your guideline to determine where to start.

If you’re just getting started with sponsorships, it might be a good idea to try your hand with donations first and then transition into tiered packages. If you already have experience with gathering donations, consider creating a tiered package or advancing into event sponsorships, especially if you have a good idea of which events would be the most attractive to potential sponsors.

Don’t forget to take into consideration the size of your team, your level of experience, and the number of supporters you already have as they will dictate some of the benefits and perks you can offer.

Keep in mind, though, that the examples listed above didn’t limit their sponsorship proposals to a single package structure. Instead, they are using all of the above as well as a few other opportunities to create different ways for businesses and individuals to sponsor their team. This allows them to cater to any budget and any business size while at the same time ensuring the minimum level of needed support.

How to Display Your Sponsorship Packages on Your Site

Once you know which type of sponsorship package you want to create, you need to decide how to display them on your site.

One way is to create a page on your site that lists the basic information about all sponsorship packages you offer. Each package should have a call-to-action using a link or a button that leads potential sponsors to a form on your site so they can get in touch with you and request more information.

Once they fill out the form, you can send them your sponsorship package in PDF format that has more information.

Alternatively, you can upload a PDF or a .doc version of your sponsorship package and link to it from the sponsorship package page. Don’t forget to include your contact information or a link to an application form within the package itself.

Get Creative With Your Sponsorship Packages

The examples above are just some of the ways you can create a sponsorship package. Use them as a starting point and don’t be afraid to think outside the box and get creative with them. Also, don’t forget to download our cheatsheet so you can keep it handy as an inspiration when the time comes to find sponsors for your team.