How to give back to your community with local sponsorships
When it comes to sponsorships, you can do well for your organization and your community by “doing good.” Sponsorships offer organizations of all kinds a crucial path to building their reputation and prominence with their key audiences, all while providing essential support to organizations that need their help.
Sponsorship of groups, causes and events is a highly effective form of marketing that requires a strategic approach. At Fryed Egg, we can help you integrate strategic sponsorships into your marketing plan, providing you with an essential and effective tool for boosting your visibility and credibility and providing authentic, invaluable support to causes that are important to you and your customers.
A responsibility and desire to give back
The primary reason for any sponsorship or philanthropic support needs to be a genuine desire to contribute to your community. It needs to come from the heart. As a member of your community, you should feel a responsibility to contribute to its health and well-being. With that in mind, it’s crucial for you to find causes important to your organization, ones that mean something to your team. You also want to identify causes where you can make a meaningful impact. When your contribution comes from an authentic place, you will maximize the impact of your contribution.
Visibility boost
Local sponsorships offer a powerful way to build brand awareness in your communities, raising your visibility and expanding recognition of your organization and your products or services. The organization or event you sponsor often will feature you in a variety of ways in front of large, engaged audiences, such as through their own promotional materials. Sponsorships also can bring valuable media coverage for your brand.
Community goodwill
When you sponsor carefully chosen events or causes, you will build positive feelings about your organization and bolster your reputation. You strengthen your organization’s image in the mind of the public and demonstrate that you invest in your community. This helps separate you from your competitors while inspiring brand loyalty in those who appreciate your support. Sponsorships also raise awareness of your organization to current and future job seekers who want to work for someone who supports their community.
Choosing your audiences
You can reach targeted audiences when you take a strategic approach to which causes you choose to support. That means identifying opportunities that will get you in front of the audiences most interested in your product or services, as well as which ones align with your values and your mission. Sponsoring a Little League team or a school event, for instance, will help get your organization in front of families. A black-tie fundraiser for a museum, meanwhile, might be a way to target affluent clientele.
Showcase your offerings
Depending on the sponsorship, you may have an ideal opportunity to show off your product or service, such as by providing samples or demonstrations. An event that you sponsor can be a particularly effective way to generate enthusiasm and early buy-in for the launch of a new product or service, and you can link any in-person efforts with social media content to build on that enthusiasm and engage with additional customers.
Forming valuable partnerships
Sponsorships are an important avenue to forming and building partnerships that provide long-lasting benefits and lead to future collaborations. That starts with the organization that you support, but it also includes your fellow sponsors. In addition, you can strengthen VIP relationships with key figures who are connected with the charitable groups that you sponsor, building your local network.
At Fryed Egg, we develop comprehensive, integrated marketing strategies to build and strengthen brands. We can help you pinpoint what makes your organization special, diving deep into your values and vision, and make sure that your brand reflects that with an integrated marketing approach that audiences remember. A strategic plan of community engagement is a vital part of any organization’s marketing plan and our team can help you build this in an authentic and meaningful way. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your marketing needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.FryedEgg.com.