Useful Tips For Robotics Teams To Find Sponsors

Finding a sponsor can be said as a common problem for all teams. Sponsors take part in meeting the financial needs of a team or any group they support. However, it is useful to learn what sponsorship means first, without diving immediately. The verbal equivalent of the word sponsor is : a person or organization that pays for or contributes to the costs involved in staging a sporting or artistic event in return for advertising. As can be seen from here, the priority expectation from a sponsor is financial, but it does not always have to be this way. Now I will talk about 5 basic steps to follow for finding a sponsor. Of course, this order and contents may differ for different purposes, but we will be explaining you the most valid way.

1- Determining Needs
When we start looking for sponsors, the first question we need to answer is what our needs are. For example, what needs do you have in your project / team? These needs can be divided into material, product and service categories. You should remove your expectations from the institutions that will sponsor all these categories. Your expectations will also determine what kind of sponsors you will be refining. For this reason, it is very important to put the need determination section at the top.

2- Investigating Sponsors of Similar Projects / Organizations
Considering that we live in a big world, yours is not the only activity around you! Many similar teams and projects have gone through the same processes until today. The trick is to examine and interpret these examples and make inferences about your potential sponsors. For example, if you are a robotic team like us, you can examine the strategies followed by other robotic teams and possibly get some advice from them.

3- Creating a List of Target Companies
The target company list literally acts as a road map. Listing companies that match the event with their contact addresses makes it easier for us to find sponsors. You can review the current status of the companies in your list and the recent work of the company, and determine the sponsorship strategies of the company. In this way, you can foresee the expectations of companies from the sponsorship they are providing. You can also speed up the process by contacting companies that you have personal connections with. Evaluating potential sponsors using the list method helps you consider many criteria at the same time. So, follow the sponsors related to your team / project as much as possible and try to get the contact information which is also crucial.

4- Sponsorship File
The most important point you will use to find a sponsor is the sponsorship file. In your sponsorship file, you should provide details about your own team or project. In addition, you should state clearly and in detail what kind of expectation you have in your sponsorship file. In order to find a sponsor, it is your duty to ensure that the sponsor you apply to access as much information as possible. Therefore, the details should take a big place.

5- Ensure Your Sponsorship File’s Tracking
After preparing our sponsorship file, we need to send it to the companies we researched and determined beforehand. However, we should be very careful at this stage. Because our sponsorship file is too valuable to be shared with everyone. Therefore, we must have carefully selected the addresses to which we will send our file. Our work doesn’t end with sending our file. After submitting our file, we should not stop following the job. We should be as careful as possible and make sure that there is no disconnection with our potential sponsors. In this way, we can be successful on the way to the sponsorship we want.