Bringing projects to life through collaboration and sponsorship

Leave Behinds Can Help Prospective Sponsors

When you’re connecting with sponsors in person, a “leave behind” can take many forms such as a document, pamphlet, a gift, and the list goes on. The key to a leave behind that doesn’t get tossed is to ensure it is relevant to what you met about or discussed, professional, and has a call to action. Sponsorship decision-makers meet and talk to many people who are looking to engage them as partners and sponsors, so how do you compile and design leave behinds that stand out?

What to Include in Your Leave Behind:

The leave behind should NOT be a proposal, a deck of sponsorship levels, or an ask for money. It is more an information piece that helps a prospective partner remember who you are and what your project is about. You can introduce the idea that you’ll provide a leave behind as you’re getting to know prospective sponsors.

5 P's of Project Success

Bringing projects to life, collaborating with businesses, and securing sponsorship in support of the dreams you are raising and projects you are working on will be supported by a plan. A great way to remember some of the important collaboration, sponsor relations, and project planning tasks is to think about the 5 P's of project success.

What Are the 5 P’s of Project Success?

In short, the 5 P’s of project success stand for:

1
Products
2
Pricing
3
Promotions, Processes & Systems
4
Publicity & Media
5
Plan

Let's run through these P by P.

3 Reasons NOT to Use AI for Sponsorship Proposals

So many people have jumped on the AI train using ChatGPT to write books in no time at all, create their marketing materials, write blogs, write website copy, and more… Unfortunately, they’re also using AI to develop grant and sponsorship proposals.

I understand the appeal for people to save time and get things done quickly, but sponsors want to work with YOU (not an AI bot).

Do You Treat Your Book Like a Business?

Authors put so much time, energy and resources into writing their book that, often, they’re not ready for the next phase of hard work with the marketing and selling of the book. As an 11x best-selling author, I know first hand how much effort goes into bringing a book to life and keeping sales alive on a regular basis. Your writing will reach more readers when you treat your book like a business. With that in mind, your book needs a business plan to ensure its ongoing success.

When you think about your book as a business, you will find you are more creative and more focused in your marketing and sales strategies.

Sponsor Fulfillment Reports: How to Impress Sponsors and Funders

Sponsor Fulfillment Reports: How to Impress Partners and Funders

If you want to stand out and show your project impact and wins to sponsors, funders, partners and champions, sponsor fulfillment reports can help. Providing data, metrics, and showcasing the projects that sponsors and funders supported is an important part of relationship building, meeting (and exceeding) agreement terms, showing the impact of project support, and setting the stage for more or multiple-year sponsorships and good project stewardship.

Elements of Sponsor Fulfillment Reports:

Sponsor fulfillment reports can be a combination of documents and evidence. Below are just some of the details you can gather to demonstrate to sponsors how their support has provided a return on investment.

When you have too many tabs open in your brain, use these 4 ideas for managing overwhelm and avoiding idea burnout.

Managing Overwhelm and Idea Burnout

Have you ever been working away on your computer, engrossed in tasks, working in your joy, ideas flowing like an erupting volcano... and then your computer crashes. No warning. No time to save. Just shuts down. As you investigate further (and recover your 27 on-the-go Word documents) and open the army of tabs that closed, you discover your computer crashed because there were just too many tabs open. Too much to process. <ERROR: Managing overwhelm function—denied!>

I have discovered that as humans we sometimes experience this same trouble. It's like our brain has too many tabs open. Too many ideas being worked on at one time. This situation happens a lot for dream raisers, creators and innovators.

So how do you avoid the crash (and burnout) just like the computer?

12 Days of Thank You

We thought it would be great to gather some tips from our Raise a Dream community about thanking, appreciating, and recognizing partners throughout the holiday season.

These twelve tips can be modified and utilized throughout the year to recognize partners, champions, and sponsors.

Sponsors & Partners Thank You #1:

Have a holiday gift card delivered to the business office. Think of fun ways to package the card. Personalize and perhaps put in a frame so that people keep the card.

Sponsorship Relationships: A Personal Thank You Goes a Long Way in Sponsorship

If you’ve been a member of our Raise a Dream community for any time, you may have heard us talk about the importance of customization and personalization to sponsorship relationships a lot.

You have read our blogs, articles, and emails where we write about avoiding generic sponsorship packages and the old school “gold, silver and bronze” tiered approach. These are quick giveaways to a potential brand partner that you have not done your research, built a relationship with them, or taken time to discover their needs or how to support their goals.

The more that you can do to honour an authentic relationship and find ways to give the “personal touch” (from the first connection through to the fulfillment of an agreement), the more you will stand out and develop long-term collaborations.

3 Small LinkedIn Strategies with HUGE Impacts

Are you actively using LinkedIn?

If not, LinkedIn can be one of your main sources of contact and research to find out who to connect with in partner/sponsor brand companies.

Just reviewing a brand LinkedIn company page and the profile of the person you are reaching out to (or having a discovery call with) before getting on the call can help prepare you with the right information to make an impactful impression.

The three LinkedIn strategies below, including a sample script you can use, will help pave the way to a YES with sponsorship and collaboration opportunities.

Sponsor Information Documents and Proposals: When a Sponsor Says,

Sponsor Information and Proposal Docs: When a Sponsor Says, "Send Me Something…"

Sponsor Information Documents and Proposals: When a Sponsor Says, "Send Me Something..."

When you do the work of researching brands, have a great series of discovery calls, and then you get to that important place in the conversation where a potential sponsor says, “Send me something…” you may not know what your partner or sponsor information document should include.

We are asked lots of these questions by speakers, authors, entrepreneurs and organizations seeking sponsorship and working on building sponsor relationships:

What do I need to provide to sponsors?
What goes in a proposal to sponsors?
What do sponsors want to see when being asked for sponsorship?
How do I articulate the value I can bring to sponsors?

One thing’s for sure… if you make your ASK before building a relationship and/or if you send a generic proposal, you can probably expect your document to end up in the garbage.

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