If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, this article and checklist is for you!
There are many desirable benefits of collaboration... Projects and dreams get launched faster when people come together with common goals, risk is reduced when responsibility is shared, and there are more ways to engage and recognize sponsors. Overall, the end result of any dream raised through collaboration and partnership can be much bigger and better than you may have achieved on your own.
Commonly, collaborative projects are often referred to as alliances, coalitions, partnerships, and networks. Working as teams or units provides the potential or ability to tackle and address challenging problems with innovative solutions.
Sponsors (and funding organizations) are more often encouraging (and in some cases requiring) collaboration as a way of reducing duplication of services, reducing risk, increasing results, and improving sustainability (you can read more here).
When you understand that building sponsorship relationships is about marketing needs (and not asking for handouts), you learn to approach each step of the partner relationship building process differently, especially when it comes to the (...gulp...) discovery call!
Discovery calls are often the step in the collaboration and relationship process many speakers, authors, and entrepreneurs feel most apprehensive about.
So today, we’re bringing you 7 valuable tips and great questions to ask sponsors to help pinpoint their marketing needs.
Now, more than ever, our brains need a break.
Just like overdoing it on your exercise routine (when your body is stiff or achy), our brains can be overworked and become vulnerable to decision fatigue. Our minds need both time to be unplugged from technology and freedom from making decisions.
Think about the number of decisions that you make throughout your work day. When there are too many decisions or too much to do, you may find yourself later fixing issues that resulted from a reactive or poorly thought out decision. Such mistakes cost us time, add to frustration, and may impact relationships you are trying to build with sponsors.
Reports indicate that we make about 36,000 decisions each day. WOW! It’s astounding isn’t it?
To build a healthy relationship with a sponsor, you have to take the time to get to know that sponsor… what motivates their brand, what language do they typically use, what audience do they seek.
Just making an ask without knowing what you propose is the right fit for a sponsor can easily result in a NO.
It’s easy to make mistakes like this, but thankfully it’s also easy to AVOID such mistakes.
That's why we've created a 3-part sponsorship educational series addressing 3 easy-to-avoid mistakes (and their solutions).
There’s a right way and a wrong way to build relationships with sponsors so that you can find funding and support for your dream project.
Creating sponsorship marketing relationships is often a new, unexplored avenue for speakers, authors, event hosts, and entrepreneurs, so it’s no surprise that in this unknown territory, costly mistakes are made.
When mistakes happen, unfortunately the answer is often a NO from sponsors.
Knowing how to avoid such mistakes is crucial, so we've created a 3-part sponsorship educational series addressing 3 easy-to-avoid mistakes (and their solutions).
If having sponsors, getting your project funded through sponsorship support, and building marketing relationships with businesses is on your priority list (which it should be), it’s important to know what causes sponsors to decline potential marketing relationships.
At Raise a Dream, we have interviewed a number of brands and sponsors to explore what helps them (and also what hurts the people seeking sponsorship). Through these valuable conversations, we were able to boil the insightful feedback of sponsorship decision-makers into the 3 common reasons sponsors often say NO.
Every day, we see speakers, authors, event hosts, and entrepreneurs making costly mistakes that will cause sponsors to say NO to their (and potentially your) amazing offerings. Knowing how to avoid these mistakes is such an important topic, we have turned this into a 3-part sponsorship educational series so that each mistake (and its solutions) gets the attention it deserves.
Building sponsorship relationships is one of many ways to raise funds for your dream project.
Crowdfunding and crowdraising is also becoming a popular way of helping entrepreneurs raise their dream and boost influence.
After having been directly involved with several crowdfunding campaigns and watching others go through the process, many of the same relationship-building, social media championing, and communication planning principles that are successful in attracting sponsors also apply to attracting crowdfund supporters.
Below are eight lessons that can help your crowdfund be successful in many ways.
One of our Big Dream Primer program students posed a great question in our Insiders' Facebook Group. The question was concerning an issue that is very real for many people with a big dream.
“How do you balance having a full-time job/career with having a big dream to raise without going down rabbit holes?” What a great question! It addresses a challenge that many of us face.
There are only 1,440 minutes available to us in a 24-hour period. This is 86,400 seconds in a 24-hour period. Now given that some of that you are sleeping for 8 hours and then potentially working at a job for another 8 hours, the issue of how to allocate the resource of your time becomes very important. How do we make the best use of the precious time that is available?
I’ve been there. The bookstore book signing is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. This does not feel good for the author or for the bookstore.
So how do you make sure your book signing events are busy, engaging people, and selling lots of books?
Ensure you meet or talk with the bookstore or book event host to plan out a shared marketing campaign.
Typically bookstores do little to promote the signings; however, here are the things that bookstores (Chapters, Coles, and independent stores) have done in the past to promote book signings when efforts to collaborate result in a coordinated plan ahead of time: