If you don’t know much about my personal life, let me inform you that like many middle-aged Canadian women, I’m a hockey mom. I spent the past 9 winters in hockey arenas from Okotoks to Grande Prairie. I’ve been in arenas so cold you could see your breath, to some so luxurious you drove away with a severe case of Arena-Envy.
After attending about 35 hockey tournaments over the years, I have seen many levels of business participation, programs, raffles, and player ‘goodie bags’. For many tournaments, the business community steps up to sponsor these events. Some do it really well, and others…
I can look back on my daughter’s hockey tournament this past weekend and review the missed opportunities that happened OFF the ice, for some sponsoring businesses. Flipping through the program, perusing the door prize table, and checking out the kids’ gift bags provided some incentive for this post.
To help you get the most out of these kinds of promotional opportunities I thought I’d give you a few pointers…
1. Learn from the Boy Scouts and Be Prepared.
If you know that local teams, schools and cultural groups regularly solicit you for sponsorships or contributions, have a game plan in place. Aside from the warm fuzzy feeling you get for being a good community supporter, it’s essential that participating in these events fits into your overall strategy.
The fast food franchises practice this: they have little ‘freebie’ coupons they can throw in to player bags for a small treat or drink. To ensure they are used ONLY at the local franchise and not returned home and redeemed there, they often stamp an expiry date on it, or state that it is good only at the local restaurants. It’s a great concept and although they’ll never get 100% of them coming back in, bringing in one free drink coupon with a family of four that needs to eat lunch brings in business that might otherwise have gone else where.
2. Have a workable Call to Action
Like the fast food chains example above, ask yourself: What would YOU like to get back out of it? Foot traffic into the store? People signing up for a new program? For something like a hockey tournament, I can assure you that most of us don’t have a ton of time to go shopping, it’s game – eat – game – eat – sleep. So what else can a business do to support a local event and still get some ROI from it?
This is an opportunity to tie an online strategy into your offline activity. If you have a retail store with an online e-commerce store, drive traffic to your website. Even if your primary goal is to increase your brand awareness within your local community, find a way to get products or services into the prospective customers’ hands so they can ‘sample’ you and have reason to come in to your business at a later date. The key is to get as many prospects to take some kind of action as you can.
3. Use ad space wisely
This one can go way beyond “business card” ads for community event programs, because most small businesses are not creating effective business cards. But that’s another post for another day…
If you have ad space as part of your sponsorship package, USE IT WELL! Ask yourself once again… “What do I want people to DO when they see my ad?”
I’ll use my business as an example… I put in a QR Code on my ad with a flag that said “FREE GIFT” when you visit grassrootsmarketing.ca. Scanning the code sent the reader to a specific landing page where I gave them a free MP3 recording. Traffic to the site, new prospective customer, new contact on the list. Mission accomplished. If two visitors decided to buy the CD for the rest of the recordings, I got a 200% return on my investment. Plan implemented, target set, results measurable.
Too many ads in the program last weekend were ‘dead air’… a business name, a phone number, maybe an address. No URL. No call to action. No opportunity to ‘sample’ the business. I might be looking for a grad gift this spring… where should I go? Why should I shop in your store versus the other 28 listed here? Wayne Gretzky said, ‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’ So take the shot. Use that space you paid for and score a result for your business.
4. Have the right stuff for printing your ads and posters
I know this one from past experience… business owners often toss a business card to the committee member asking for the donation and ad, and tell them, “Just scan what you need off the card.” UGH!
I’ve already mentioned how odds are that business card is not an effective sales tool anyway… but scanning it to reprint? This drives me up a wall, especially when it’s a red and navy logo on a gold textured paper… ohmygod by the time it gets reprinted it looks like something I pick up on my walks with the dog.
You should ALWAYS have a vector version of your logo ready to email at a moment’s notice. Vector files are those ending in .eps, .ai or .bmp. Even a high resolution JPG or PNG file would be better than scanning a printed image. Just ask where to email it and they’ll get it to the right person. It saves time and gives a better image for your business.
And again, have your call-to-action ready for them to put in place so they’re not guessing what you want on your ad and you end up with ‘dead air’.
5. Do Door Prizes Right
I have to say, Olds has the best damn raffle tables of all the hockey tournaments in Alberta, thanks in large part to the contributions of our local businesses and the go get ‘er work of the parents. We have teams that write back to us after our tournaments to compliment the committee on the fabulous tournament and great raffle. So having seen how well we do here, I’m going to share some successes…
Give products, not coupons. Like I said earlier, we don’t come to shop, we come to play in a tournament. I overheard one person from an away team comment on a $50 gift certificate prize that there was no point in entering that prize draw because they can’t come back to town to use it. Down a few more baskets, and there were actual products from other stores, each probably worth $50 a piece. Better to donate a $50 hoodie or purse than a gift certificate, because now the prospects SEE what you offer, and the winner gets to SAMPLE it for themselves (and of course, fall in love with it).
Here’s the second half of the equation though… with that donated prize, include an online gift certificate they can redeem at a later date when they shop your online store. Have it expire a few months after the event so it’s not floating around forever… but that accomplishes a second objective, to drive SHOPPING traffic to your website! You can have a pile of these discounts printed and have them available for everyone, or put it in your program ad.
One last and VERY important point:
6. Follow through on your sponsorship promise
This one comes from our trip to the Atom Provincials last March in Grande Prairie. We took a bus, and with each player there was at least one parent, and a few other relatives in the area came to watch the girls play. We had 15 girls if I recall, so an estimated head count every time the team wanted to go for dinner was about 45 – 50 people. The tournament ran from a Thursday to Sunday.
One of the MAJOR sponsors was a franchise restaurant. Each team manager was given a coupon from this restaurant, inviting the team to come and eat at one of their two locations. (If I recall it was good for a 20% discount on our tab, quite substantial.) So we picked one evening when we had a large enough time block to allow us to get to the restaurant, eat and get back for our next game. That worked out to be supper at 6 pm on Friday night. I phoned to make the reservation, and here is what I was told:
“I’m sorry, we can’t take reservations for groups that size Friday OR Saturday.”
Excuse me? You’re a major sponsor of a provincial tournament, this discount is ONLY available at these two restaurants, only for provincial tournament teams, and you won’t accept our reservation?
So we asked if we could place an order for take-out and we would eat back at the hotel. Still no… They were too busy to accommodate us.
It’s a nearly 7-hour drive from Olds to Grande Prairie. We were NOT coming back all that way on a week night when it was convenient for them just to eat pizza for 20% off the regular price.
Sponsorship FAIL.
If you are going to make an offer – whether as a sponsor or any other time – you’d better be prepared to follow through with it.
PS – On a personal note, my daughter’s team won their division this weekend after a thrilling final game that came down to a shoot-out… and my girl was the goalie. First year between the pipes and she’s really doing well… 3 tournament shut outs and now this. I think I have to start monitoring my blood pressure after games like that. 
