A little name-dropping never hurts. Often corporate decision makers are hidden behind a maze of secretaries and closed doors. Industry and trade associations meetings offer a prime opportunity for current supporters to avoid such barriers and network directly with potential new sponsors. The key to maintaining corporate support is to keep corporate sponsors closely informed of how their money is being spent to help the community, and appropriately acknowledge their support. At Project del Rio we try to link sponsors with specific schools or projects, so the company can tangibly see the fruits of their contribution.
Publicity is one of the major benefits that a monitoring project can offer to sponsors.
Effective approaches used at Project del Rio include mentioning sponsors in interim and annual reports, publicizing a corporation as the major sponsor of a workshop, having the company name mentioned in newspaper articles, and producing T-shirts with sponsors' names on them. We include a copy of this chart in our funding requests to help sponsors choose their level of investment. We have found that keeping up with our corporate sponsors is a huge task, so large that we recently decided to hire a new fulltime staff member to handle public relations. The job involves promoting Project del Rio not only from the project's perspective but also from the sponsors' perspective - that is, making sure sponsors are acknowledged in articles, press releases, and reports. Finally, the public relations staffperson needs to assist in the sponsors' own publicity efforts by providing their public relations departments with photographs or materials for presentations, arranging special promotional activities, and so on.