How to Create a Sponsorship Package For Your Team
By now, you probably know that finding a sponsor for your team can make a lot of things easier. If your team is in need of funds, finding sponsors is an excellent way to ensure you can invest money where your team needs it the most. This can include anything from new equipment to making sure your venue expenses are covered.
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you might remember we’ve shown you how to find sponsors for your team, how to add new sponsors to your website with the Sponsors feature in SportsPress, and how to make use of your community and club members to find new sponsors.
In this post, we want to walk you through the process of creating a sponsorship package for your team, what to include in it, and how to price it.
What to Include in Your Sponsorship Package
Let’s start with the essential elements your sponsorship package should have. For starters, it must provide benefits for both the team and the organization or business providing a sponsorship. Your sponsorship package should meet your primary goals and outline sponsor’s obligations as well as metrics that will help both you and the sponsor to measure the results of the sponsorship. Here are the elements you must include in your sponsorship package.
Start With Your Profile
The first item on the list is to present your team’s profile. Consider this section as a mini-version of your About page. You’ll want to include when your team was founded, total number of members, the size of your audience (think social media followers, email list, fan club members), and any significant achievements, awards or individual player performance stats.
You should also include information about your website, such as the number of monthly visitors and pageviews if you plan to offer banners on your site as one of your sponsors’ perks.
Lastly, if you receive media coverage, whether it’s your local TV or radio station or your local newspaper, make sure to include this information as well.
A List of Sponsorship Requirements
Next, you must list the requirements that your sponsors should meet. You’ll want to describe your team and use clear language to describe what you expect. This can include financial contributions that will be used to buy new equipment or reserve a venue for an upcoming season or match. You can also include the cost of traveling to tournaments or marketing costs.
A List of Benefits For The Sponsors
You need to provide potential sponsors with a list of benefits that they will receive. When you think about it, showing what’s in it for them is usually the most effective way of convincing someone to invest in you. A list of benefits can include:
- Increased brand awareness
- Exposure to new demographics
- New referral customers because of an exclusive discount code
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When it comes to the benefits, you are only limited by your imagination so don’t be afraid to think outside the box.
Define the Scope of the Package
Now that you’ve listed requirements and benefits, you need to define the scope of your package. If you want to attract a range of sponsors, it’s best to create tiered sponsorship packages and outline which methods you’ll use to achieve the benefits listed above.
Some methods include:
- Guaranteed advertising spot in your venue or website for a year or more
- Guaranteed logo inclusion on your equipment for a year or more
- Naming rights for your team’s mascot or official venue
- Their logo on your team’s jersey
- Exposure on your social media profiles
- Promotion to your email list
- A shout out during video replays
- Media coverage if your matches and tournaments are televised or covered in other media
- And more.
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You’ll want to include how long the sponsorship package is for, cancellation and refund policies, renewal cost, and the price of each package.
Success Metrics
You’ll also want to define which metrics will be used to measure the success of your sponsorship. For you, you can see if the price of the sponsorship package adds to your bottom line or if it generates extra costs for you without breaking even.
When it comes to sponsors, the metrics will be split into tangible and less tangible results. If their audience size increased or if their sales figures went up as a result of sponsoring you, those metrics are tangible and easily measured results.
Less tangible results, on the other hand, include examples such as increased brand awareness, an increase in customer loyalty, brand perception among a new audience demographic, and more.
Once you and your potential sponsor agree on what type of metrics you’ll use, document how you will measure them (for example, using a referral tracking software or analytics on yours and their website, keeping track of their followers on social media, social listening, and similar).
Call to Action
The last item in your package should be a call to action. This section doesn’t need to be very long but it should include the following:
- Your contact details such as email, mobile phone, social media handles, and website address
- An invite to attend your match or event
- A brief thank you note and a link to your Sponsors’ page on your website
How to Price Your Sponsorship Packages
Now that you know what a sponsorship package should include, let’s briefly discuss the pricing of your package. As we mentioned before, a good idea is to offer tiered packages. You can structure the price as a monthly recurring fee or an annual payment.
You can also create different plans for events and tournaments on top of asking for general club sponsorship. The price of your package will depend on the number of matches or events that your team participates in as well as the number of people who attend every game and the number of visitors your website receives.
For example, if your website receives a thousand unique visitors a month, you can offer 1000 monthly impressions to your sponsors. That means that if a cost per impression is worth $0.20, you could charge $200 for a display banner on your site.
Similarly, if you play roughly 15 matches per season and each match is attended by 500 people, you can offer 7,500 impressions per season. If a company values that impression at $0.40, you could potentially charge $3000 for one of your packages.
Keep in mind that not all impressions are equal. A large banner in your venue will be worth more than a simple tweet, so tailor your packages accordingly.
Create an Amazing Sponsorship Package For Your Team
Now you know everything about creating an amazing sponsorship package for your team. Use our article to guide you through the process and download our sponsorship package template so you can get started immediately.