Crushing Sponsorships:

How to Secure Sponsorships

Overview

Unlike traditional sports organizations that have alternative income sources, most esports organizations rely on volunteers, prize earnings, and individuals paying directly for services. Even in semi-professional and collegiate club teams, Esports organizations depend on sponsorships to participate in or host events.

First, it’s important to understand what exactly a sponsorship is. In my definition, sponsorship is a very specific ask (often monetary) from a brand/company/individual in return for advertisement from the player/team/organization. Framing sponsorships like this will help you in every step of creating your sponsorship plans.

Secondly, you need to know exactly who you are, what you have to offer, and what you need! That sounds straightforward but it can be confusing if you’ve never had to compile information like this before.

Table of Contents:

1. Who are you and what are you doing?

2. What do you have you offer?

3. What do you need to ask for?

4. Why a tiered system?

5. The 10/30/60 System:

6. Outreach preparation

7. Who do I outreach to?

8. Things to keep in mind:

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Who are you and what are you doing?

What is your event/team trying to do in the space? Use what you’re trying to accomplish to inform your outreach.

• Is your team focusing on becoming a professional team and needs monetary support to achieve those goals?

• Would your event focus on competition between BIPOC women?

In addition to advertisement chances (or engagement with the brand), brands also care about brand voice. Are any members veterans, women, BIPOC, LGBTQ, or disabled? Find brands that align with the makeup of your team/event and the ideals that you represent.

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What do you have to offer?

Are you on social media accounts already? Having this information compiled before you start will be invaluable and be sure to grab the information for all of the players on your team/organization that would be applicable.

• Compile your engagement metrics,

  • Twitter: like link click-thru, post engagement, and followers

  • Twitch: Followers/subscribers and viewers

  • Youtube: video view averages

  • Discord: community numbers

  • Facebook: Page likes, share metrics

  • Instagram: Followers, share metrics

  • Tiktok: Followers and share metrics

  • If you’re not on social media, it’s time to start building a brand for yourself and your organization. Presence on social media is required to build a modern esports brand. You don’t have to be on all of them though!

Has anyone on your team/organization done past affiliate links? Pull the information from these links (click-through, purchases, etc) to add to your sponsorship request.

Does your team have Jerseys or other physical items brands can be placed on?

Think of anything else your team has to offer that is unique and gives real value to the brands you will be requesting.

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What you need to ask for:

Create an itemized list of your estimated costs, and go deep. Define when/what exactly the funds are for and the scope/length

• For travel, be sure to grab the per diem rate. Per diem covers lodging, food, and other living expenses while traveling. For the US, here is an excellent calculator that is free.

• The price of flights/car travel can be determined in advance for the estimate but pad these estimates for fluctuations.

• If your team or organization is hosting the event, get the rates of all staff members, the equipment you may need, rental agreements, prize pools, etc.

• From this detailed itemized list, mark priority items if you cannot get the amount for everything.

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Why a tiered system?

Now that you have your budget broken down, a trick that I like to do, regardless if it’s a team or an event that I am seeking to secure funds for, is to offer tiered sponsorships. This does a few things:

1. Frequently, you have multiple things to offer brands and tiered sponsorships allow you to pair what you can offer to an exact price.

2. Giving people choices often sets them up for success. Without the tiers, you are ultimately asking Yes/No questions (all or nothing). A tiered sponsor system can allow businesses to say yes more often if their budget is more in line with what you’re offering.

3. Create competition if you limit how many can sign up for specific tiers.

4. You can game the tiered system using psychological effects like anchoring and false choices, but I won’t get into that in this overview.

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The 10/30/60 System:

You may be thinking, "A tiered system sounds great, but how do I set it up?" I keep it simple by using percentages: 10/30/60. The lowest tier, with the least amount of rewards, is 10% of your overall budget and would require a minimum of 10 sponsors to sign up under that tier. 30% is a big step up and their rewards reflect as much- 3 sponsors can sign up and almost clear your budget. Finally, 60% of the budget is reserved for the largest stakeholder and they get the largest boons. The tournament or team is often “powered by” that brand, their logo is placed everywhere, and often is just as large as the host or team's logo.

I don’t typically limit how many 10/30 sponsors I reach out to or accept, but I reserve the 60 for only one company. Of course, this advice is generic and you can go with 4 tiers or 2 tiers, or change the percentages for the 3 tiers. What’s important is your event’s cost is covered and your team is happy with how it was funded.

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Outreach Preparation

Now that you have all of your information together, it’s time to build out three things:

1. Outreach copy. This can be used over social media, email, or technically over voice conversations as a script. Outreach text should include a simple introduction, what you’re asking for (your sponsorship totals) and why (hosting an event, competing, etc), and ask to chat about the details in length. Include links to your socials, attach your one-pager, and your contact information. Optionally, it would be great to include a Calendly link to schedule meetings.

2. One-pager infographic. This can be in a pdf, jpg, or short video (think 20 seconds). In this graphic, you want to include who you are, all of your stats condensed (engagement, viewership), your tiers amounts and what they’d unlock, and the deadline for sponsorships. This can be formatted also to be sharable on your social media accounts.

3. Pitch deck. this longer document (Google slides, Canva slides, pdf) walks the potential sponsor through all of the information that was previously condensed in the one-pager, including any example graphics.

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Who do I outreach to?

Great question and this is probably where most people get stuck when looking for sponsorships.

The easiest way to find sponsors in Esports is to look at previous events and existing teams and see who is sponsoring them. Once you discover the company, go to the sponsor's website and see if there is any obvious information about sponsoring and affiliates. You may need to use Google-fu and search “site: URL” sponsor” to search for information.

If the information isn’t obvious, you can either contact the team’s community manager or the media contact for the sponsor. Both of these staff members will most likely be able to point to the most effective point of contact regarding the sponsorship. Not every team will share its resources, and not every company will allow open applications for sponsors, so keep that in mind.

For any company that you’d like to approach, it’s best to email a real person versus their generic help or info accounts/emails. The person receiving the emails is more likely to route them to the appropriate contact at the company. There are lots of tricks out there on how to find emails of people working at companies, and here are some of my favorites:

• Hunter.io: finds emails of company employees and their Linkedin and is exportable into CRM like HubSpot and Zapier. Hunter.io allows 50 free searches a month.

• Linkedin: You can go to companies and pull up employees from the company. Linkedin allows you to have so many “in-mail” for free a month, but you can also request connections with people on LinkedIn. I would avoid doing the sales pitch in a connection request. When you do communicate, make it much more conversational than an email.

• Twitter: Twitter is a little harder to find direct contact with specific businesses, but sometimes you can find people using Twitter native search tools. Users will then either have their email in their bio or a Linktree. For extra fun, some users have their email hidden on their other socials (like their Twitch bios, or their youtube connection).

• Ask your existing connections with players and organizations

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Things To Keep In Mind

During your outreach, remember three things:

1. Remember, this is a two-way transactional offer. You need to offer something to the brand in exchange for their sponsorships.

2. Some brands can’t sponsor directly but can sponsor goods/services. Examples include a hardware company sponsoring 10 peripherals (like mice) to do a giveaway during the month of your league. Another example could be local hotel branches comping rooms.

3. Any funds secured above your current budget should be placed in your business account and act as an escrow for the next event.

Keep track of who you are outreaching out to, how you reached out to them, what the response was, and if any follow-up is required. Some budgets just aren’t available now and team members will want to sponsor you in the future, or the flip side, some businesses never sponsor. The next event that you do any kind of outreach for, you now have a starting point of people to engage with.

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