Thread: sponsorship/advertising $$$$

Hi all - I am doing a business plan for a non-profit website addressing environmental problems and solutions. A core group of founding corporate sponsors will sustain the website during development and first-year launch.

What I am wondering is: how much to charge for a standard sponsorhip (logo, acknowledgment, link) when you are still in development and consequently have not established a user base? Plus, how to justify rate? These sponsors will essentially be investors desiring to reach a highly targeted audience, and the sponsorship will guarantee them a place at the table. The website has great potential and will initially focus on California, Oregon, and then beyond.

Any thoughts, everyone? Plus, is there a go-to community or website that discusses issues pertaining to sponsorship and/or internet advertising for beginning players, such as myself?

That's a tough question, considering most people base their prices off their current traffic. Any reason why you can't hold off on advertisers until you have a traffic base? That's the way I'd go. It's much easier to justify cost if you have numbers to back it up. Otherwise, how do you even know the price is fair?

I think you should find out what you competition is offering and is it personally evaluate if it is worth the money.
If not then i suggest creating something that is totally unique, but is cheaper than you competitors. You must make our price low, but fair, because of the service you provide.

Hi Lisa,

Thank you for responding. The reason I am approaching sponsors now is to generate income to get the site up and going. I have to pay a researcher, developer, artist, writer, etc. so that I can pull all the pieces together. If I try to do it all by myself, it will never get done. By offering sponsorships in advance, companies earn a spot at the table for an entire year that cannot be usurped by any other company. In exchange, they will be reaching an audience that they would like to target and is otherwise unavailable to them.

In an ideal world, I'd love to get the site up and running first. But I would go out of pocket WAY too much.

Zagyzebra,

I have recently found myself in the same situation you are in. I have started a new web design company where we follow high school groups (band, choir etc) on their class trips. We build a site specific to their trip and have ad space available for local and national companies. One site we did received over 800,000 hits in one week. Great targeted traffic, but we had no other sites to compare to, to relate or set advertising fees.
We ended up comparing ourselves to print in our area that does school advertising.

Sorry for the winded response.

Rod

I understand that but it just makes much more sense to have the traffic first instead of charging people for what could be traffic with no guarantees. I am just not a fan of that model.

I don't know what your timeframe is like, but have you ever thought about building up a content site on environmental topics first, learn about SEO so you can build the all-important traffic, and make some preliminary money with AdSense and other affiliations? This approach takes longer but at least it will help you build up a traffic base so you can present a more professional advertising package with justifiable prices.

I totally agree with you Lisa and to me it seems pretty obvious.

If you put yourself in a potential advertiser's shoes, you would like some kind of concrete assurance for return of investment.

If a company is paying cold hard cash for effective advertising space, you really need to 'quantify' what they are getting for their money.

The only way I can see you doing this is showing legitimate, consistent traffic volumes from relevant keyword searches for the products they're buying advertising for.

It's idealistic to think that commercial companies will throw money at non profits organizations via their websites just for the good of humanity. But the reality is that companies expect to get 'value' for their advertising dollar regardless where they advertise.

I have gone over this sort of business model, and with this kind of model as with many others there's very few if any real ways of passing off the initial investment costs of establishing the business while still being receptive to any future bulk tangible returns.

I think this basic law of business applies......

That being those who are prepared to take on a greater risk, stand to receive the greater return, the secret is to effectively manage the risk.

Here's my take on the business model.....

Find clubs, sporting, social or basically a club niche that's most financial and offer to provide 'cheap' club websites. You could include all managerial tasks from hosting, domain names, you take over the lot with the exception of content updating.

Your selling point could be that the clubs sites will in time have an increased capacity to attract more financial sponsors, greatly inceasing the success of the club over time

A shortcut here could be to approach the regional office and offer a package deal for say 300 sites.

One condition could be that you reserve the right to access a certain portion of space on the sites for advertising to subsidize the cost of the sites.

Most people are not that familiar with web design, and your average Joe Blo isn't familiar with wordpress so you sell the fact that you can set up a system that gives the club the ability to maintain their own site through an interface much like Microsoft Publisher, (do not mention wordpress).

Provide an online example of a great template and how this could be the clubs site.

I think I don't have to go any further, I hope you get the idea.

Just like any business proposition you really have to present up front, a compelling, valuable and tangible benifet before any business is going to pick up the tab.

Just the same Zag I hope this gives you a few ideas on how you can further develop and refine your business idea.

Best of luck and if you wan't to bounce some ideas off me, feel free!

John Salamon

In light of all the feedback on this board, I picked up a book last night and began to study html and downloaded Word Press. You'll probably see me lurking on the Word Press board next.

That said, there are a number of companies that have already expressed interest in helping fund this site. Naive it may be, they are interested in helping this would-be non-profit achieve a charitable goal, particularly when in exchange they'll get unlimited exposure for one year to an audience they'd really like to reach.

Further, a foundation is inviting me to a third meeting to discuss providing seed money...this organization's backing would give me instant street cred.

If I don't get backing from the foundation, I may just go ahead and knock this thing out on my own in some sort of minimal fashion, just to get it rolling, which seems to be the popular consensus on how to proceed here.

My background is in national marketing and promotions. It is this background that leads me to take the course of sponsorship first, followed by development, and then marketing. Time and again, I was paid to build audiences, to the point where I was able to retire at a very young age.

This said, I am going to heed the advice on this board and begin to learn to build the elements of this myself...well, maybe with the help of these forums here.