Acquiring Sponsorships
Finding potential sponsors
The first step to acquiring sponsorships is finding and compiling a list of potential local businesses who would be open to sponsor your high school team. Luckily, if you navigate to the potential sponsors tab, you will find a list of businesses who are open to sponsoring high school teams, their contact information and location also provided.
​
However, if none of the businesses in the potential sponsors tab are suited for you or your highschool team, an easy way to find some is to go onto google maps and search local businesses. From here, you want to go in person and simply ask for a manager or owner and ask if they are open to giving sponsorships to high schools sport teams. Keep asking from business to business until you find a handful who agree.
​
Negotiating sponsorship conditions
Once you have found a group of businesses which are open to providing a sponsorship, you want to finalize the terms of your sponsorship, the best way to go about this is to create several packages with different price points and benefits. These benefits you should discuss with your teams coach and if necessary the athletic director. Example packages with prices and benefits are below this page alongside a template.
​
Once you have created a list of packages you want to either email or go in-person to discuss the sponsorship terms, for instance what package they will select and if they agree to the benefits for the price. (Remember this is high school sports, so their sponsorship should be greatly appreciated as they don't gain as much as they are giving, so be respectful!)
What next?
After acquiring the sponsorship itself there are a couple steps you still need to take. Firstly, receiving the payment itself, there's a couple ways to get the funds of the sponsorship to your team, usually a check to your schools booster club, earmarked to your team specifically, will do the job. If that for some reason is not possible, have a conversation with your athletic director.
​
Honoring your part of the sponsorship is the most important part, usually it will not take much work depending on the benefits, for instance if you need to display some sort of banner for the business within your stadium that should be done as soon as the money is given to your school. (For more information on properly giving the sponsor their benefits scroll to the next section)
​
Lastly, you want to keep good relations with any of your sponsors, so an in-person thank you or even an email thanking them will go a long way to maintain a positive relationship and even invoke future donations for your sports team.
Your end of the deal
One of the most important steps as mentioned earlier is discussing the sponsorship with the business owner and the benefits they will receive, when doing this you must be fully ready to deliver what ever it is your promise. So what exactly should you promise? Usually, the best benefits for a business in a sponsorship is advertisement based, so very a basic or lower priced package a simple shout out or mention on your teams instagram page is a great start (if you have access to, or can contact the owner of the page)
​
Another common way is to print a banner of the company and display it in your schools stadium field, this is a great way to not only give your stadium a more authentic field it is also a great way for the business to advertise, you can usually print the banner using some of the money from the donation so this should be reserved for medium to high donation amounts. For more information on where to print your banner go to either of these websites: Staples Banner Printing or Office Depot Banner Printing
​
Now in all of this its important to make sure that your school is aware and has allowed this, this permission can be granted usually from either your coach or your schools designated athletic director so make sure to have a talk with either one of them or both of them.
Examples:
.png)
.png)
Contact
If you have any other concerns on acquiring sponsors leave a message or contact
the phone number below