Just the other week one of Britain’s top orienteers, Graham Gristwood, tweeted about Team Sponsor, a new website to help match athletes to sponsors (nothing new there) along with the opportunity for microfunding from individuals.
For most athletes, the size of your sponsorship is not important. They are not looking for a huge amount of money. They just need your help to buy a specilaised piece of kit or simply a new pair of trainers. Whatever you decide to sponsor, you can be assured that it will be greatfully received.
And indeed for Graham you can contribute towards any one of these items, all of which would aid him in his quest to become World Orienteering Champion:
- Altitude Training Camp in Kenya (£1,200),
- 20 sessions of Sports Massage (£400),
- Garmin Forerunner 405 (£195),
- Training weekend in the Lake District (£100),
- Magicshine MJ-808 Headlight (£90),
- New Balance MR828 shoes (£65),
- Moscow 3L Compass (£34)
Now, while I’ve a massive respect to full time athletes and am fully behind any attempts to help support athletes meet their goals (and pay their bills) – particularly in sports where sponsorship opportunities are limited, I can’t quite see this working so well as other crowdfunding initiatives.
Crowd or micro-funding has become increasingly popular in recent years and been proven to work well in the arts, with music and film being particularly successful. I’ve seen this firsthand in fact, with my girlfriend’s short film recently attracting around $1000 to help fund production costs.
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While many contributing to these endeavours will do so out of goodwill, because these projects are typically funding a tangible product it is much easier to sell the benefits of support.
Frequently they are effectively a preorder for a cd, dvd or book, with there being more elaborate ‘benefits’ for increased contributions. Perhaps a limited edition copy of the product, special thanks in sleeve notes/credits, invites to the launch party or shows, and even parts in films. Some of the more interesting benefits I’ve seen recently came from Princess Superstar sourcing funding for her latest album, and offered a Rap Lesson, cooking dinner and even the shirt off her back!
At the very basic level you are buying the item in advance, and getting the item reinforces the feeling of goodwill when it is received months/years down the line – ‘I helped make this happen’. Therein lies the real difficulty in trying to transfer the crowdfunding principle to sport.
For those supporting athletes in this way there is no obvious tangible evidence of your support, either as a personal reminder or for gratification purposes (look at me doing good!). While it may be hoped that such requirements aren’t necessary, I fear it may be a stumbling block. Altruistic sport sponsorship by companies died a death a long time ago and now needs to generate a return on investment. While I’d hope individual sponsors would be more altruistic, and those knowing the athletes certainly would be, trying to attract others might require a reward in some form.
How to get round this? I’m not sure. It is probably down to the athlete to investigate ways and means for showing suitable appreciation, but it is probably only manageable for the larger donations. For Graham it could mean offering a 2 hour orienteering masterclass or a motivational talk at a company or club event.
If a gold medal came his way I’m sure that in itself would be a fantastic payback for supporters, but what if it doesn’t? Will supporters dig into their pockets again next year? The need for regular funding support on a yearly basis is another stumbling block that’ll have to be tackled.
The website too could help supporters (and themselves) by making it easy for people to publicise their support. They might already have something similar, but if not then an easy win would be a simple support sharing mechanism after donating. ‘I’ve sponsored Graham Gristwood in his quest to become World Orienteering Champion, you could too: link’ – click to share this via Facebook/Twitter/etc (and look good amongst your friends). One of the best things about crowdfunding is that you’ve got ready made advocates of your project who can help you spread the word, so you need to facilitate this and make it as easy as possible for them.
It’ll be interesting to see how it all goes for Team Sponsor and the athletes using it. Graham has this week been joined by fellow GB orienteering star Kris Jones offering both support for the concept and competition for your orienteering sponsorship finance. It’s a low risk and low maintenance means for them to hopefully find some funding and I hope it will help them both reach their goals, and ideally get more out of it than just a new compass.
