A Plea of Final Desperation

[Jaine Perotti]

Beth, I am so sorry that your team is having difficulties finding sponsorship.
While I don't have any contacts myself, I have a few unique suggestions as to how you might be able to find new sponsors.

1) Get out a phone book, look in the yellow pages, and make a list of potential sponsors. Write down all of their contact information and addresses. Phone them, mail them, or even visit them to ask for sponsorship. I would recommend the last two, as it is much harder to ignore a phone call or a visit. Divide the jobs between team members so that it isn't so overwhelming.

Using this method, I was able to add at least 100 new sponsors to my team's mailing list.

2) Get a list of the richest people in your town (it is a little bit of a superficial way to get sponsors, but it works). Our team found this information by finding out who had bought the most expensive homes in the area. When our team did this, we mailed letters to the richest people in one of our school districts towns, Kent.

Some of my successes: About a week later, I was on the phone with Ben Rosen, founder of Compaq computers. He ended up hooking us up with other sponsorship possibilities. <-- rich people may have connections, as well as money...

Recently, I also received a letter along with a donation from Jane Kaczmarek, star of the show "Malcolm in the Middle".

3) Let your community know about the desperation of your situation. When you write your fund raising letters, explain the importance of the potential sponsor's help. Don't over do it, but make sure that it is communicated to the public that without their support, the team may no longer exist.

4) Have each member of the team come up with at least 5-10 individuals or businesses that they know to add to the mailing list. Our team has done this: the advantage to it is that businesses/individuals who know someone on the team will be more likely to donate money to it.

5) To keep everything organized, copy all of your sponsor's contact information and amount that they donated into an Excel spreadsheet. That way, you can remeber who has already been contacted that year (businesses hate when they get more than one person visiting them for the same thing) and so that next year, you can approach these same sponsors again.

6) Go to the Cybersonics "FIRST Interactive Rural Support" website. Even if your team isn't rural, there is alot of information here that is very good. Our team has used this website as a resource.

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Originally Posted by Arefin Bari

is there a way we all can come up with some kind of idea, that way we wont lose any team that has joined FIRST.

Arefin, you are so very right about this.

Me and a friend of mine have thought about this a lot. We came up with an idea that has not been fully developed yet, but hopefully may be a possibility for the future.

There are a lot of teams out there who have a lot of money (for whatever reasons there might be). What if these wealthier teams could establish a "scholarship foundation", so to speak, for teams who have a need for money and are in danger of dissolving because of it? If teams across the country could pitch into it, maybe money could be available to those who have been determined to have need.

We first came up with this idea when we heard that some of the teams who had qualified to go to the championships would not be able to go because of a lack of money. We said to ourselves, "If only our team had enough extra money to hep them pay for the expenses!"
From that point on, we thought that if our team ever became wealthy, we would like to have a separate account for extra money to go to needy teams.

I guess this in itself deserves a new thread topic, but I think I may wait awhile before starting one, just because the idea isn't fully developed yet.

--Jaine