How to get free sponsorship worth $1000s

to promote your business

Fast forward to 6 months later.

We hadn't done anything with our database, because it was a bit small for us to make much money from.

We wanted about 2000 people before we would really do any work with it.

A new year was about to start at the university.

Time to kick into another gear, and run the same promotion again, but at a bigger and better level.

How we set up the 2nd bigger promotion - and received $1000s in free sponsorship

Back we went to our sponsors from last time.

This time the stakes were higher.

We had proved our concept worked.

We had done what we said we would do:

• advertised them face-to-face with hundreds of potential customers
• promoted their business
• brought new customers to them for free

There were going to be 5,000 potential customers walking around during the first 2 days of the university year.

We would be there, with...

• a team of 5 promotional people, talking direct face-to-face with each person
• a film crew (my brother who is in the film industry, plus a sound guy who was one of our mates)
• a slightly-professional photographer (another one of our mates)
• our own promo marquee tent thing (provided by the university for $10)

We told our sponsors we would...

• give two days of intense face-to-face promotion of their business.
• our film crew will capture the event on video to show them the results of the promotion, and generate extra hype around the whole event. (People thought we were important / famous because we had a film crew there).
• our photographer would take pictures of the whole event so they could see what happened.

So with all the extra stuff going on, this time we asked for money as well as free stuff.

And we got it.

Here's the letter we took with us to give to them explaining our promotion, in case they wanted something to look at and to "think about it" first.

Click it to download...

Letter to potential sponsors (click to download)

About half of them did want to think about it first...

...but we followed up by phone or in person a few days later, and signed some of them up - like the local dive shop who gave us a free dive trip to the Great Barrier Reef.

We didn't have any where near as much negativity from managers as the first time...

...partly because we didn't contact the really bad ones,

...and partly because they were already familiar with us from the first time,

...and partly because we already had proven our concept worked - we had results...

Between 1 and 3 short conversations with each sponsor resulted in...

• $2,300 worth of free drinks and a specially-sponsored party at the #1 club in town - all totally free
• a few hundred dollars in cash
• $50 dinner at a classy salsa club / cafe
• $50 free drinks at the #1 techno nightclub
• $300 diving trip on the Great Barrier Reef from a local diving shop
• free tickets and boat transfers to a "full moon" island party where thousands of people attend, worth over $100
• free promotional shirts to give away from Bundaberg Rum
• lots of other cheap promo things like a garbage bag full of printed beer coolers and so on...

We used the cash from our sponsors to...

• help pay for our film crew to fly up from Brisbane
• rent professional video-cameras to record interviews with customers about how great our business was.
• sound equipment with a great big boom thing for the microphone.

Our film guy would turn these interviews into cool, sharp TV-style ads that we would put on our website and distribute on CD ROM to our advertisers and potential new advertising clients.

We used some of the cheaper promotional stuff to...

• get a group of people to all sign up at once by giving the first person who signed up a cheap crappy promotional gift like a beer cooler or key ring
• reward some random people who decided they loved our service so much that they would help us for free by signing up 20 or so of their friends, or an entire college of university students. We gave away the free Bundaberg Rum shirts to these kind of people.

Sneaky tip: Think on your feet, and find ways to USE the promotional stuff to generate more signups than you normally would - don't just give them away for nothing.

By doing this we had extra people that we didn't have to pay getting totally involved in helping us build our database and our business!