High School Sports Fundraising 101: Selling Discount Cards vs. Business Sponsorship Packages
Chris Herman - Founder & CEO
The Old Way of Fundraising for High School Sports
High School Sports are constantly evolving--from rules to tactics and schemes, the games we love look different today than they did a decade ago. The cost of maintaining a successful sports program is also constantly increasing. Whether it is uniforms, travel, meals, or equipment, the bottom line is an ever-growing target. Despite the dynamic nature of this field, and the need to effectively fundraise, the methods of high school sports fundraising have stayed the same for decades.
As a former high school and college football player, and as someone who has met and worked with hundreds of coaches and booster clubs, most teams rely on traditional fundraisers: selling discount cards, cookie dough, flowers, and car washes or collecting Booster Club “membership fees,” or player fees.
Don’t get me wrong, these make money, and some of them make serious money. I have clients that raise $20,000+ with their discount card sales. Earlier this year I met a coach in Virginia who raised over $30,000 for his team selling mulch... MULCH for crying out loud!
But all of these fundraisers suffer from the same flaw: they are one-dimensional. They all involve selling something that people don't really want, but that they are willing to buy to support the program. These fundraisers are basically a charity and, aside from the money that benefits the team and players, these fundraisers rarely give back to the players, the purchasers, or the community!
You might be wondering-- what are the other options? What are the alternatives? Well, keep reading and I’ll explain X fundraising opportunities for your high school sports program.
The Beauty and Simplicity of Sponsorships for your High School Team
Sponsorships are easy, lucrative, and a mutually beneficial fundraising option for sports programs and sponsors. While sponsorships alone may not be sufficient, they are a great way to complement whatever fundraising methods your program already uses.
When teams sell sponsorships to local businesses, they’re giving businesses advertising exposure to the players, parents, alumni, and fans. Business sponsorships are often tax deductible, and many times can be a worthwhile investment for the business. Even if a sponsoring business only breaks even on the investment, it's a win-win. The company gets new business, plus the goodwill of helping the team and deepening their roots within the community.
Need more convincing? Consider dentists, doctors, financial advisors, real estate agents, and other professions with high-ticket services. If a real estate agent gets one new client from a $500 team sponsorship, they will easily get 5x-10x their money back. If an orthodontist does the same, they will get 20x the return on their investment.
The same goes for home improvement or maintenance services like carpentry, roofing, landscaping or other services. My brother owns a roofing company in Upstate NY, and he is sponsoring ourhometown high school. If he gets just one client from that sponsorship, he will easily generate $10,000+ in sales . And even if he doesn't, he generates good publicity for supporting the hometown team and stays connected to the community. The next time a family in that community needs a new roof, they are going to call Herman Exterior Homes.
The same concept applies to lower or regular ticket purchases like eating at restaurants, coffee shops, or other regular services. Certainly, patronizing the business a single time won’t return the business its investment, but people will frequent the business more often and long after the teams’ season comes to an end.
Sponsorship vs Discount Cards
In comparing sponsorships to selling discount cards, the benefits of a sponsorship become even clearer. For example, most teams mandate that every player sell about 10 discount cards at around $20 each.
Let's say you have a football team with 100 players. If every player sold 10 discount cards for $20 each, your team yields $20,000. But it's not that simple, because on $20,000 in sales, you can expect around 20% of that to go to the company that creates the discount cards.
The other difficulty is holding all the players accountable to their goal. It can be an uphill battle getting players to sell 10 discount cards, and you don’t want to spend time tracking sales and chasing down players to sell more.
This is why corporate sponsorships are awesome. When selling sponsorships in our Story of the Season, we encourage our clients to create a team-wide mandate where every player sells at least 1 ad or sponsor for a set price that varies based on the team’s fundraising goal. For example, if you have every player sell a single ad at $200 each, you raise $20,000 and each player only has to collect money from one vendor. It's so much easier!
The other great thing about sponsorships for high school sports teams is that they don’t hit the parents and fans directly. So you can sell discount cards, cookie dough or other things directly to consumers, and complement that fundraiser with a sponsorship program, which hits different people - so you're not double dipping!
How to Package and Sell Sponsorships for your High School Sports Teams
When I speak to coaches and booster clubs about fundraising with sponsorships, I tend to hear the same concern: effectively and easily selling the sponsorship packages. This topic is worthy of its own blog post. But in short, there are many ways to structure your sponsorship program. In general, I recommend bundling team sponsorship packages together with several of the below options and creating different Gold, Silver, and Bronze packages. Options to include in those packages are included below.
Fundraising Methods to Pair with Sponsorships
Stadium Banners
This is a classic, and one of the easiest ways to do it. We have lots of clients that sell field or stadium banners that are hung on the fence for an entire season. The beauty of this is that they are cheap to design and print (~$50 each) and can be used year after year with zero marginal cost after year 1. In other words, if you sell a banner ad in your stadium for $500, you net ~$450 in year 1 and can use it year after year at no additional cost.
T-Shirt Sponsors
This is certainly not my favorite, but it works for some programs. You can put your sponsors logos on the back of a team t-shirt and sell the t-shirts to the players, alumni and fans. You get the proceeds from selling the sponsorship and the t-shirt sales.
Halftime Shout outs
Many of our clients offer their sponsors a halftime and/or postgame shoutout or advertisement over the loudspeaker by the announcer. This is an extra little bonus to throw in that sponsors appreciate.
Social Media Shoutouts
This is easy to do and once it's done the first time, can be copy and pasted week after week. Write a short ad thanking the business for sponsoring you and give them a shout out every week on all your teams’ social media channels. You can even have some businesses sponsor the “Player of the Week” graphics that are posted on social media or the “Game Day” graphics. Best of all, your social media posts have a much larger reach than a logo on the back of a t-shirt or a banner ad at the stadium, which are hard to see and only get lots of views during games.
Examples of Sponsorship Packages
Now that we have some different ideas around high school sports sponsorships we can start to bundle them together into packages. As mentioned, I recommend making 3 or 4 packages. Let's call them Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.
You should always have a low prices, affordable sponsorship option for smaller businesses or patrons. At the same time, you should also have a premium option to the big businesses that can make larger donations. That said, a Bronze sponsorship package might be $100 or $250, while the Platinum Sponsorship might be $2,500+. This way you are making the sponsorship accessible to small businesses but also able to sell a small number or large ticket sponsor packages to businesses that have the cash available.
Using the abovementioned sponsorship ideas, here is a sample sponsorship package you can try for your program.
BRONZE: $100
1 Parking Pass for all home games
1 season ticket
Company name on thank you page in Story of the Season Program
SILVER: $500
1 Parking Pass for all home games
1 season ticket
5’ x 5’ Stadium Banner
¼ page ad in the Story of the Season Program
GOLD: $1,000
2 Parking Pass for all home games
4 season tickets
10’ x 5’ Stadium Banner
Halftime announcement / ad read
½ page ad in the Story of the Season Program
PLATINUM: $2,500
2 Parking Pass for all home games
4 season tickets
20’ x 5’ Stadium Banner
Halftime announcement / ad read
Full Page interactive ad in the Story of the Season Program
How to make your High School Sports Sponsorship Program Multi Dimensional
By now I hope you see the ease and profitability of creating and selling team sponsorship packages instead of making the players sell stuff that nobody wants. But you may also notice that selling sponsorships to fundraise for your high school sports team, like selling discount cards or team donation fundraisers, is also one dimensional. So how can it be improved? By fundraising with a Sports Media Guide or Program!
You may have noticed the “Story of the Season Program” option in our hypothetical sponsorship packages. At some point you may have heard of or seen a high school or pro sports team’s Media Guide or season/gameday Program. Programs are often printed magazines highlighting and introducing the team, coaches and players with rosters, statistics, historical information about the team, articles, player bios and information and other content.
Programs can be a boring, minimalistic “ad book” with little team content and filled with ads, or they can be interesting, content rich, and full of life. You see, an “ad book” is one dimensional. But a program with bios on all the players, rosters with player information, notes on each player from the coach, a coaching page, historical information about the team, articles and other exciting content, then it becomes a multi-dimensional fundraising tool, a go-to resource for fans at games, and a great keepsake for your players.
And Story of the Season is that and so much more! But we will leave Media Guides and Programs for another blog post. I hope this blog post gets the ideas flowing and helps you kickstart your next fundraiser that deepens connections with the business community and your team and helps you reach your fundraising goals!
