Reaching Out To Large Donors

[bananajojo]

Hello!

I hope everyone is having a good season!

The topic at hand for this post is how to reach out to large tech companies such as Apple, HP, DELL, etc. Being a team that has been competing well, we have been ok at raising funds for our season. A typical season goal is $40,000. We do often never make it to that number; this year we rose around $35,000.

The problem arises when we want to attend two regionals, as the fees to attend are not cheap. We need to reach out to the largest donors we can find, as our local school district is the largest donor to our team. We reach out to a ton of local sponsors too, but many of them contribute small amounts.

So, any advice on how to approach large companies for a sponsorship?

[quarky]

Hey there, it’s great you and your team are hoping to find more sustainable sources of funding to propel your team to new heights i.e increase the number of competitions you compete at/season. The advice I give below is under the assumption you have a sponsorship packet/ sponsor tiers setup- I’ve linked the ones that were developed when I was a student but tiers and advertised benefits can obviously be adjusted to whatever best suits your team’s needs. I’m happy to elaborate though on either of these resources if y’all don’t have something similar already or your looking to give your current sponsorship material a refresh.

The biggest takeaway from helping Business as a student for a couple of years that I can provide is to leverage your team’s connections. The most immediate ones we usually start with were surveying parents to see where they worked and if their companies would sponsor our team. Friends of parents/mentors/staff also work assuming said friends are comfortable and willing to assist the team thru company sponsorship. Most of the bigger sponsorships I can recall us getting were much aided, if not required that we put an employee down that was connected to our FRC team: Qualcomm, Leidos, Raytheon, DoD STEM, Apple, etc. ← These are just the ones I remember off the top of my head writing/filling out as a student. From there, it’s important to keep these relationships by developing a strong partnership with the company sponsoring you. Since parents usually only have students on the team for so long, it’s important to still maintain good relations with the company sponsoring you and keeping up with employee references, so as to keep the sponsor for many years to come Usually around the end of the competition season, I recall preparing swag bags with merchandise or gift baskets to drop off with our sponsors as a token of our thanks and depending on the sponsorship tier, we’d even offer to demo our robot for them.

So, you’ve exhausted connections your parents/teachers/mentors have. What’s next? Beyond that, if at all possible, start compiling in the offseason/post competition a list/spreadsheet of sponsors and grants you’d like to apply to for the following season. Yes, this does require a fair amount of pre-planning and overhead work to find such opportunities but preparing this list ahead of the fall gives your Business team a running start in getting to begin on delegation and completion of such sponsorships and grants and not having to devote any time to looking for potential other funding avenues. Seeing as your the only team in Montana, my advice to look at sponsors for other Montanan teams is moot but for the competitions you typically attend, taking a look at what companies other teams have sponsoring them can help you easily fill your list of future sponsors/grants to reach out to. Here’s a snippet of the headers for the spreadsheet I made with another Business student my junior year to track what we were working on (2018 - 19):

Apologies for how zoomed out this comes across but this is the general format I think the team still carries on using. The one important column we might be missing here is due dates. From the compiled list, it honestly becomes a thing of cranking out each application and keeping tabs on when things are due and if sponsors/grants would like more info to help decide if they want to provide funding or not. We also ended up having a color-coded system, think red, yellow, green, in prioritizing and figuring out which sponsors/grants we thought would be more fruitful and likely to give our team money.

This is a lot of information all at once but don’t hesitate to reply or @ me with any questions.

[bananajojo]

Thank you for your very detailed response! I copied the link to your answer and am having our business team take into account everything you mentioned!

[ghstshckrvl]

I love how your award showcase looks, how did your team format that?

[quarky]

Thanks! If you’re asking about the sponsor packet and all the bells and whistles there, there was a combined effort my first two years on the team to put together a branding document like so to standardize any documentation we published The way the awards are formatted in the sponsorship packet is just some fancy formatting using tables in Google Docs. It’s honestly a format I’ve carried on with college clubs now and organizing prior documents in Google Drive.

[Rainydaymaker]

Don’t expect to get a huge donation from a big recognizable company in a distant city. Focus on $2K every year from a few, $500 from a few more, etc… It adds up quick.

Focus on local manufacturing companies. Start with a search of local companies that are seeking to hire Mechanical engineers. If they are hiring, business may be expanding and making a connection with companies making things can become a long term relationship.

Getting your foot in the door can be the hard part so start with companies where you have a connection (parent, or parent contact). Get in the door with an ask for a tour and an opportunity to tell your story and demonstrate your robot. The presentation should end with an ask, Mentor, Internship, Services in kind, and Financial. Leave collateral behind and be happy if it ends with a cool tour of their facility.

Follow-up with information about competitions, how to watch the live stream, how you did, and how this has impacted student lives, build a relationship.

[Julin]

We found that in person presentations to companies were more effective. Make an appointment and take a small team, some robot parts that have a story, and then be interested in what that company does. In kind donations can be very helpful as well, we get $ off our teamwear in exchange for sponsor recognition. Have a powerpoint that all your presenting students are familiar with.