Contacting potential sponsors
Goal of a Sponsorship
The most obvious goal of contacting reproducibility workshop sponsors is to gain funding for the workshop. This funding could be used for flying in speakers, paying for the venue, paying for printed materials, paying for promotional items, paying for refreshments at the event, or even for paying for small gifts for the speakers. Other, equally important goals include developing new contacts in a given field of reproducibility and helping spread the word about the workshop. Overall, when working with sponsors, you should be looking for organizations who you think will bring value to the workshop (more than just money) and with whom you’d like to establish or maintain a relationship. Your communication therefore should not be one-sided or purely transactional.
Tips for contacting potential sponsors
Reach out to organizations whose values match the goals of your workshop Organizations are more likely to sponsor you if they think your work aligns with their own goals. In addition, you do not want to be associated with a group that is willing to give you money but that you don’t trust or whose mission you don’t agree with. Poor alignment between sponsors and organizers may keep potential attendees from signing up for your workshop.
Don’t make it all about you While we’re sure you’re workshop is going to be amazing, remember that sponsors need good reasons to provide you with funding for the event. In your initial contact with potential sponsors, make sure you indicate why you’re reaching out to this particular organization and what things you can give to them as sponsors.
Make sure you have incentives for sponsors Sponsors may give you money simply because they like the goal of your workshop, but at the very least, they’ll likely want their names visibly associated with the event in some way. Some incentives you can provide to potential sponsors include:
Hosting the organization’s logo and a link to their website on the workshop’s webpage
Including the organization’s logo and a link to their website in a handout
Including information about the organization in a booklet handed out at the event
Providing sponsors with physical space at the event to promote their organization
Don’t overload potential sponsors with information in the first email As with all forms of communication, you’ll want to be as concise as possible when you first reach out to potential sponsors. The main points you should hit are:
Short description of the event (1 sentence)
Short explanation of why you’re contacting this particular organization (1 sentence)
How much money you’re looking for with a list of what it will get the organization (1 sentence with short bulleted list)
Get an introduction through your network if possible While it can work to send an email to the “contact us” email address on an organization’s website or to cold email an individual (don’t be afraid to do this if you have to), you’re more likely to get a response if a mutual friend introduces you to someone at the organization you’re hoping to get a sponsorship from.
Provide more information in follow up emails After your initial email with the important details, the potential sponsor will likely have a number of specific questions or concerns. When responding, make sure you clearly address each of their concerns and provide more details about the event if they’re interested. Finally, don’t be afraid to ask the sponsor to help promote the event when the time comes. Even if they said “no” to providing funding, they may still be willing to help promote the event.
Example contact email
Example 1
*Note* - In this particular example, we didn’t ask about funding until a follow up email where we indicated that the organization could be included on a separate “sponsors” page of the booklet if they provided any funding. The goal here wasn’t focused on getting money but instead focused on getting as many reproducibilty-focused organizations in the booklet at possible.
Dear XXXX team,
My name is Tyler Ford, an Outreach Scientist at Addgene the nonprofit plasmid repository. I was recently introduced to your organization through YYYY at protocols.io and I wanted to invite you to collaborate on an upcoming reproducibility project.
On May 9th Addgene will be working with Harvard Medical School to host a minisymposium on reproducibility. The minisymposium will feature talks about reproducibility, tools to make work more reproducible, a panel with people working on and impacted by reproducibility, and a beer hour to further discuss solutions.
As part of the minisymposium, we’ll be generating a short booklet highlighting some of the tools that researchers can use to make their work more reproducible. Would you like XXXX to be featured in the booklet and/or would you like to attend the minisymposium (even just the beer hour)?
Let me know and I'll be happy to pass along more details.
Cheers!
Last updated