Six tips for pitching community engagement to sponsors

Quality community engagement involves listening and responding to the needs of the community.  This kind of meaningful and useful engagement can be immensely attractive to local sponsors – but how do you find those opportunities? We have some tips from WFYI’s sponsorship team that might also work for your station.   

Create an intentional structure to help build trust and communication.  

Establish a regular meeting between Development and Content/Community Engagement and find paths to share information about events and activities that are being planned in the coming months. Development and sponsorship teams need to know what the engagement and news teams are working on in order to effectively fundraise around it! 

Create a templated sponsorship package that will work with all kinds of engagement

Community engagement events often respond to current events, and there is not a huge amount of lead time for finding sponsors. Create a standard approach for town halls, listening sessions and other engagement efforts so the sponsorship team can build a templated sponsorship package. Here is an example of how we created packages tied to televised and Facebook Live discussions at WFYI.

Offer sponsorship packages tied to themes or content areas. 

We may not often know exactly what Community Engagement activities will take place during a quarter, but there may be a content area or theme the team is working on. Sponsorship teams can create a sponsorship package tied to supporting the overall content theme, instead of specific engagement activities. A package like this would include “Proud to Support spots” that would tie the sponsor to the content, but not directly to the program.   

Here is sample message that could run on air (and with a digital campaign) “ABC Company is proud to support WFYI’s work to help parents and caregivers with essential educational resources to combat summer learning loss. Learn more at wxxx dot org slash education” 

Establish clear conflicts of interest & implementation plan.  

Due to the nature of community engagement and news, there may be some sponsor categories that the team would consider off limits. Make sure your sponsorship team is clearly aware of these potential conflicts and create a system for clearing potential sponsors in advance. Work together to set clear sponsor recognition parameters and deadlines and make sure everyone is clear about how sponsors are recognized and tied to the project.   

Communicate any changes to both your audience AND your sponsors. 

This is so important, it’s worth stating again! One small change to timing or the way an event will be promoted could affect the timing of sponsorship deliverables. It’s important to consistently communicate updates in speakers, topics, event structure, etc. Even if the changes don’t affect the sponsorship logistics, it will give your development team a nudge and a great opportunity to follow up with prospects or pending sponsors.  

Share the impact of your work 

When you get feedback or have examples of the impact of your community engagement work, from personal stories the influence of engagement on reporting, share those with the development team. These messages of impact reinforce the importance of work that the station is doing in the community and can be used to share the full picture of the important mission of the station.