How to Write a Sponsorship Proposal That Earns

Learn how to secure sponsorships for your (in-person and digital) events, conferences, webinars and more.

ALL students will receive our Turnkey Sponsorship Toolkit - the complete sponsorship solution. This all-in-one sponsorship seeking toolkit includes all of the tools you'll need to start landing sponsors, including:

• Sponsorship Proposal Templates

• Sponsor Cold Email Templates

• Sponsorship Pricing Calculator

• Sponsorship Reporting Template

• Sponsorship Lead Workbook

• Sponsorship Implementation Checklist

• A Copy of Our Acclaimed eBook: How to Find Event Sponsors

• And so much more!

This entire bundle ($119 value) included with every course signup!

Now, on to the course...

Our event was doomed...   

To be more specific, our event was $8,700 in the red. All my friends and I wanted to do was host a weekend taco festival, and bring some delicious fun to an otherwise dreary abandoned lot in Chicago. What we got instead was a barrage of last-minute overages and unforeseen expenses. With less than a month to go, we needed cash, and we needed it bad.   

So we did what any resourceful event producers would do: solicit sponsors! We spent the next few days putting together our proposal, complete with 3 different tiered sponsorship packages: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Breathing a preemptive sigh of relief, we sent this proposal out to over 500 local businesses (yes, 500!), sat back and waited for the money to start rolling in.   

4 weeks later we tallied up the results. Our neat little sponsorship packages had netted us a grand total of…$0. That's right. Zero. Absolutely nothing. We had failed to secure a single sponsor!   

And so the three of us, all college students looking to make some summer cash producing our own festival, learned a very expensive lesson. Even though our event sold out, our failure with sponsorships meant we were each forced to shell out over $3,000 to cover all our remaining expenses.     

Does this scenario sound familiar? What has your failed sponsorship proposal cost your event or organization?

From that day over 10 years ago, I vowed to determine exactly where we had gone wrong with sponsorships, and do everything in my power to ensure no other event producer, entrepreneur, charity, or small organization experienced the same devastating lesson we received that summer. I wanted to decode the mystery of sponsorship, and share the secrets with everyone who had experienced this same pain. My path was set, and it was time to dive headfirst into sponsorships…   

Over the last decade, my career in sponsorships has taken me across the globe. From major music festival production for firms such as Sony and Live Nation, to managing sponsorships and marketing relationships for one of the world's fastest ecommerce start-ups, and finally to where I am today, serving as the President of Event and Sponsorship Management Agency SilverCrate.    

My current role gives me the privilege and responsibility of showing all our teams the most effective tactics and tools for building profitable sponsorship programs, providing them with the resources they need to start creating successful sponsorship programs on behalf of our clients. This training is the culmination of the last 10+ years I’ve spent learning from that costly summer mistake, and pulls together all the best information gleaned from my time developing profitable sponsorship programs for everyone from Fortune 500 firms and Internet Retailer Top 200 companies, to independent event producers, regional sports teams, small charitable organizations and more.   

A few years back, while in the middle of overhauling what we at SilverCrate call our "Six-Figure Sponsorships Training Program" (the training program we use to get our clients earning six figures or more with their event sponsorships), I had an epiphany. While this robust sponsorship training regimen had certainly paid off well for the company and had allowed me to achieve my original goal of decoding the mysteries of sponsorships, I was still not reaching the vast network I had promised to help 10 years earlier. I had made a vow to learn the absolute best ways to succeed with sponsorships, and share this information with entrepreneurs, event producers, and small organizations across the globe, so that they could avoid the painful lesson I had learned.    

It was time to make good on this promise. In order to expand my reach, I had to build a program that would allow me to share this training with anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world...    

And so How to Write a Sponsorship Proposal that Earns was born!   

How It Works

How to Write a Sponsorship Proposal that Earns is more than just an in-depth training on building a profitable event sponsorship program. It's a step-by-step workshop designed to give you everything you need to start finding sponsors for your events in just days.    

Each lesson is comprised of two components: The Instruction and The Action. During the instruction phase of each lesson, you'll participate in several accelerated video trainings. All substance and zero fluff, these trainings are generally no more than 10-15 minutes in length and will provide you with decades' worth of sponsorship expertise and best practices, condensed down to the core elements needed to build your own successful program.   

After the instruction phase of the lesson, you'll move on to The Action. In this phase, we show you exactly how to take what you just learned in your video trainings, and apply it directly to YOUR sponsorship program.    

This means that by the end of the course, you will have already developed all the following sponsorship tools and templates for YOUR specific event:   

• [Your Event Name Here] Audience Profile   

• [Your Event Name Here] Sponsorship Inventory (what you can sell)   

• [Your Event Name Here] Sponsorship Proposal   

How to Write a Sponsorship Proposal that Earns will guide you step-by-step through the creation of all these tools, meaning that when you complete the course, you'll have all these documents ready to go. No more waiting. No more trial and error. You'll have everything you need to begin your journey towards landing deals and creating new revenue streams through sponsorships.   

What You'll Learn

While certainly not easy, everyone we train comes to understand that sponsorships are a relatively simple concept. At their core, sponsorships are nothing more than leveraged value: leveraging the value of the sponsor (brand), the property (event/charity/sports team/etc.), and the audience in a way where everyone wins.    

In order to maximize your ability to create this leverage valued, our instruction will focus on providing you with several core sponsorship skill sets, including:   

• Understanding the most common sponsorship solicitation mistakes, and ways to avoid these pitfalls   

• Identifying and quantifying your Audience (the MOST important part of sponsorships)   

• Building your inventory of Sponsorship Assets - i.e. "what you can sell" (Hint: it’s a lot more than a logo on a website or a t-shirt)   

• Building your sponsorship offers (and saying goodbye to those generic “Silver, Gold, Platinum” packages)   

• Creating the perfect Sponsorship Proposal – one that’s PROVEN to land you sponsorship dollars   

These skills, taught in-depth over the course of the program, will place you in an elite class of sponsorship seekers, and ensure you never again feel the pain of being unable to generate any significant sponsorship revenue for your events and programs.   

The Schedule   

By maintaining a sharp focus on teaching only the most effective and up-to-date sponsorship methods, we are able to keep this course brief and to-the-point. Our ultimate goal is that you sit down with this course in the morning, and by the end of that very same day, you’ll have created a sponsorship proposal for your own event that is lightyears ahead of what your organization has been using in the past.   

What's Included in the Course?   

Students of How to Write a Sponsorship Proposal that Earns will receive ALL the following tools, trainings, and bonuses:   

• Unlimited, on-demand access to over 12 exclusive videos trainings   

• Downloadable worksheets and assignments designed to walk you step-by-step in the development of your own profitable sponsorship proposal   

• Unlimited access to email support staff to answer any questions   

Frequently Asked Questions   

Who’s this course for?   

This course was built with small-to-medium size events in mind. Whether you run a small Meetup group that hosts monthly networking events, operate a regional racing team, are hosting your charity's annual fundraising dinner, or produce a series of Food Truck festivals for 25,000 people, the concepts in this course will help you develop a proven, profitable sponsorship program for these events.   

Will this help me get sponsorships for my [race build, blog, chess club, podcast, etc.]?   

While geared towards small-to-medium size events, the lessons we teach in How to Write a Sponsorship Proposal that Earns are applicable across a wide range of activities. In fact, this course has been used in as diverse applications as Mommy Bloggers looking to find sponsors for their content, athletes searching for endorsement and ambassador sponsorship deals, and musicians seeking sponsors and grants for their ensembles. As long as your [blog, chess club, podcast, etc.] is creating value, the lessons taught throughout the course can show you how to leverage it to gain sponsorships.   

How much time does it take to complete the course?   

This course was set up to be completed over the course of a single day, with about 2 hours’ worth of learning content, and another 6-8 hours of developing your own sponsorship proposal using the skills learned in the course.   

I'm too busy for this...is there a shortcut?   

We know that as entrepreneurs, fundraisers, and heads of organizations, you're incredibly busy. That's why we've designed this course to work around your schedule. Though the intention is to take the class in a single day, everything is on-demand, meaning you can dive in wherever and whenever it's most convenient for you.   

Featuring all substance and zero fluff, this is more than just a course; it's a step-by-step program designed to save you countless hours when it comes time to solicit sponsors for your events. Our lesson plan will bring you that much closer to a completed sponsorship program, ensuring that by the end course, you'll have all the documents, tools, and most importantly - the knowledge - to go out and successfully secure sponsors.     

Is it a commitment? Yes. But so is everything else in life worth doing. Most of our students run businesses, chair organizations, take care of their family, run side hustles, and have many other responsibilities and obligations. But they're still able to set aside an hour each day to work with us on building their sponsorship program. Because they know that in the end, the success they'll achieve with an effective sponsorship program will be worth every second they put into this course.   

Next Steps   

Are you ready to stop spinning your wheels with half-hearted efforts to secure sponsors for your events? Are you ready to develop a robust knowledge of the most widely-accepted best practices, tools, and techniques that events across the globe are using to earn six-figures or more in sponsorships?    

Great! Then join us in The How to Write a Sponsorship Proposal that Earns course, and start landing sponsors for your event today...