In a world where everyone wants to do everything online and have a business that requires them to be there for 20 minutes a day, tools like getting a community sponsorship, e.g. local crowdsourcing, are wrongfully losing their flair. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones right under your nose.
Today, many entrepreneurs are worried about scaling their business 5 years out, but they forget that it’s the money and relationships of today that determine your profitability tomorrow. Using basic sales and marketing tactics, outlined in this article, will help you get the community sponsorship you desire. However, it’s how hard you work with these tactics that will determine your level of success.
What’s Your Mission and Your End Goal?
This might be a little cliche to you, but it needs to be said. Without a clear goal for your company, getting people to follow you, hiring employees, and getting people to give you money with a community sponsorship will be extremely difficult. If you already have a clearly describable mission and a set of short to long-term goals, then, by all means, skip this section.
However, if you’re still struggling to figure out what your mission is and the goals you wish for yourself and your company then get out a pen and pad and start writing. Get all your goals out on the page and learn to write your mission in the simplest possible terms. What you discover from this exercise is now your elevator speech, that you will need when you tell your community why they should support you.
Mission Statement
Your mission statement needs to be simple enough so you can explain it in one to two sentences. Any more than that and you’ll lose your ability to convince your community to join you.
Remember, you’re not speaking to experts in your field. If you over complicate things, you’ll confuse your audience and create a lack of trust. It’s not something that your community will openly speak out against, they just won’t have their checkbooks as open as they could possibly be.
One to two sentences max is all you need. The more details you put in the longer it will take your audience to understand it.
SMART Goals
SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Sensitive in nature.
After you have your mission statement widdled down to one or two sentences you’ll need to create an action plan for achieving that mission. Having a SMART goal plan is the best way to ensure that mission will become a reality because it creates a visible path for you to achieve your mission.
Showing your SMART goals and creating benchmarks for your mission will make getting a community sponsorship easier to attain if you can show your audience the path to success. Also, sharing the process with them will entice them to share the mission with their friends and family and make them feel good about their choice to join you.
Click the link in this sentence for an overview on how to create your own SMART Goals.
Choosing the Right Community Sponsors
Knowing who you want to target is half the battle. The wrong community sponsorship will cripple your ability to achieve your mission, so being very specific about who you want to attract is just as important what you want to attract.
Start with identifying what kind of community sponsorship you’re looking to attract. This will help you voice your marketing campaigns properly. You should strive to know everything about your target audience like where they eat, what they do, are they married, and are they rich?
It’s easy to assume that your target market is one way, and without properly investigating other possibilities you will miss opportunities. Too many marketers neglect to take the time before they spend their hard-earned dollars to actually understand if there are people willing to participate in the endeavor.
Relevance
Every participant, whether they are financial or a volunteer, must feel strongly connected to your mission. If what you want is relevant to them and there is a benefit to them joining you, it will be easy to attract your ideal audience.
Social media, especially Facebook, is fantastic for creating communities. Another great tool is the free app, Meetup, which is specifically designed to help you build any kind of community you want.
Let’s say you want to create an initiative to bring music classes back to elementary schools. You can create a free WordPress website and a Facebook group to capture a nationwide audience. Then create a Meetup group. You can meet once a month to show progress, have fun gatherings, live music, etc. to bring attention to the growing need of bringing music back to schools.
You can use this setup for virtually anything.
Communicating Your Mission and Goals to Your Audience
After you establish what you want to do and how you want to do it, it’s time to go out there and get your community sponsorship. All of the tactics listed below are great, but your ability to sell your idea to enough people is the only way your idea will spread. Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic bullet to get people to like you, and the secret is simply hard work.
Each of these strategies does work, but only if you do them enough. Find the one that works for you, and keep in mind that you might need to do all of them at some point.
Actionable Strategies to Get a Community Sponsorship
Cold-Approach
Cold Calling, Emailing, and print ads work for a variety of businesses and they will work to get a community sponsorship.
If you have a sales team, you should triple-down your efforts on cold-outreach. Social selling (i.e. using social media to book appointments) works for a variety of reasons, and if you have a millennial sales team this would be the best approach. However, nothing beats face-to-face meetings.
Use social selling and cold-calling to find participants. If you’re struggling to get that initial conversation, try emailing them. Everyone has their preferred method of communication, and some people still love email over all others.
The best approach is to combine your attempts if you have a variety of ways of communicating with someone. Try their most active places first. For instance, if you see they are active on Twitter, send them a direct message. Then use a tool like Hunter.io to ensure identify their email address, and if nothing works, just call them and close them.
Networking Events
Networking events will significantly increase your chances of getting more community sponsorships. The key to these events is to go there with a purpose.
The idea is to meet at least one person that you can follow up with after the event. If you go there with the intention of signing people up right away, you’ll go off “needy” and fail to make the contacts you need. Go there with the intention of making friends and then categorize the friends you meet into acquaintances and buyers.
Do you remember the mission statement I had you write? This is the place you use this mission statement.
Most of your interactions will be in a small group setting in casual situations. When you introduce yourself and tell people what you do, don’t bore them with the details of your objectives. Just tell them your mission and be more interested in the party and them.
Free Presentations
If you’re one for public speaking, then hosting an event at your local convention center will draw in interested parties. If you’re new to this make sure you get a good amount of practice in before you speak to a 1,000 people. Join your local Toastmasters chapter and learn to speak with authority and charisma.
Don’t just make yourself the focal point. Try and get other organizations to help you entertain the masses and possibly support funding the event itself. Many companies are willing to share the load and put their name on a tent or catering if it’s a cause that interests them.
Is Money The Only Kind of Support You Need?
Some of the best organizations don’t have employees. They have a fleet of volunteers willing to donate their time to for the sake of the mission. Getting money for funding business operations is a fantastic way to build a company, but what is better than money is willing participants that believe in what you do.
The money will come if you have the right mission and the leadership to direct the followers to take the right action. Even the resources you need, with the right kind of support, will become available if your mission is strong enough.
If this article teaches you anything, I hope it’s the inspiration to open your mind to the possibilities of how you can achieve your goals. Getting a community sponsorship is a tool to building a successful “anything,” but don’t think it’s the only thing you need to get where you want to go.
If you want to create an online business locally, use the tips in this article to get a community sponsorship. If you want to know more ways to create your business check this article.
