How to Find Sponsors For Your Charity Event

Locating sponsors for your charity event can be quite a task and you will need to follow a couple of steps to make sure that you are able to have your event sponsored correctly and in time with the right type of sponsor for your event. If there is only one person going out and trying to locate sponsors there is a chance that you will need to get some help or you will just have to work your butt off, which is usually what will happen regardless.

Most importantly is you have to do your research. You will want to find the companies that you feel will fit best for your event because the chance of them sponsoring it is sometimes a lot more likely and it will be an easier sales cycle for you and your team. What I mean by the right company is by looking at the types of people that will be attending your event. What is your charity focused on? Is there going to be a certain theme of the entire event? These are the things that you will want to look at first. This will help to cut down your list of companies to a number that is your core focus leads. Remember this is a sales process, you have to come with something to the table for the companies that you are trying to get to sponsor the event.

It is of course always best if you have an ongoing relationship with these companies, from either prior events or that they are in the same industry. Doing ample social networking can also help when you are trying to get in there and get a good relationship going. Granted social networking if done consistently enough will make your potential sponsor warmer to your approach, but it will still take some time. Even so a lot of the times the person that is running the social media isn't the person that will handle sponsoring the events, but they can point you in the right direction.

You will need a lot of time.

If you are putting on the event in a month or two and wanting to find sponsors before that time you are going to be out of luck. Companies just don't have the structure to organize that quickly. There is usually too many people to have sign-off on it and a process like that for a big company takes months. So it is best to be planning your event and getting sponsors a year or more in advance, just to be completely safe.

Come To The Company With An Attendee List.

This can be difficult if you are doing this months or even a year in advance, but if you have this information this can be gold. Because the company that is considering sponsoring your event is going to want to know who is attending. It is the same thing here as finding the companies as you might have done in the previous steps. Just if you come with this information ahead of time there is a better chance that your sales cycle will be sped up and you will have the answers you are either looking for or not. But the point is that you will be getting it sooner than later if you have all your ducks in a row when you first meet with the company.

Look To Previous Events For Inspiration

This is going to be the easy part. If you know of events that have taken place in the past that are in your area of what your charity is about, look at the websites and see who sponsored those events and reach out to them. There is a high likelihood if that company had success from that event that they might be looking for more events to be present at and you might be able to get them on board a lot faster, if they have seen success in the past.

Getting a charity event setup and executed perfectly is going to be difficult and time consuming. But if you go into the sponsorship side of it with a plan, it will make the research a little bit less hectic. Remember 5 hours of planning will save you probably a month of execution.