Corporate Sponsorship: It is about making friends. It is about connecting person to person.
I’m Heather Nelson. I’m a Corporate Fundraising Specialist, and this is another one of my Summer Stewardship Tips.
It’s about making friends. I know it is also about asking questions and we’ve talked a lot about making the conversations and the emails about them and not about you, but at the same time, when you’re building a partnership or a sponsorship over time, you do want to make a connection.
You do want to become friends. You do need to be friendly so that when you’re calling or emailing. It’s an enjoyable exchange for the person on the other end.
In order to do that, you need to share a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your personal/professional story. How do you do this? You give information about your vacation, or your pet, or your kids, or your being, in my case, a hockey mom, these sorts of little tidbits that make you relatable, that make you a person that they can connect with. And you look for little tidbits like that from them.
You’re not probably going to be best friends with the sponsorship person that you’re working with on the other end, but it should be an enjoyable exchange. So do share a little bit about yourself.
And if this is starting in social media, there is a lot of opportunity to reveal little bits of your personality within your social media in a way that helps people engage with you. That’s sharing tweets that aren’t just retweets. It’s about writing a little bit about yourself and what’s going on with you. So whether it’s social, or on the phone, or in a zoom meeting, share a little bit about yourself, because it is about building friends.
I wish you the best of luck in building friends and building sponsorships. You have other ideas about how to do that, leave a comment below.
Other Summer Stewardship Tips:
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