Sponsorship drive...

[Cement Legs]

As a team we have what we feel is a bunch of good ideas and some material to keep us busy for a while; however our funds are running low and we still have a ways to go. Can anyone share some of the problems that they have experienced in this area and ways that they have overcome them. Our school is in a small market area in eastern Canada so any suggestions that may help us boost our income would be extremely appreciated.

[Cement Legs]

As a team we have what we feel is a bunch of good ideas and some material to keep us busy for a while; however our funds are running low and we still have a ways to go. Can anyone share some of the problems that they have experienced in this area and ways that they have overcome them. Our school is in a small market area in eastern Canada so any suggestions that may help us boost our income would be extremely appreciated.

[Chris Clarke]

We are in the same sort of situation. Except for the fact that Vancouver is much larger than Fredriction, so we arent as restricted.

A couple of things that we are trying to do to improve the cash flow are:

1) We are currently trying to get some students from the marketing department to join the team to deal with all the sponsorship. We figure they will be much better at attraching potential sponsors. Plus it will allow us to concentrate more on the engineering.

2) Trying to get a large company to sign on as a major sponsor. So for something like $10000 a year, we would be the ABCDE Formula UBC team, and use their company colours, etc.

Of course, as we speak, I think that we only have around $1000CAD in our bank, and are waiting from some money from the uni and sponsors.

[gug]

we have a team of twenty, and at the start of this year our marketing manager went through the phonebook and picked out any engineering sounding companies. he gave each team member a list of 20 companies to call and ask for sponsorship. we called about 600 companies in total (some people came back for more than the 20)

this method worked pretty good, i almost got 1 AUD$10,000 sponsor and another AUD$5,000 (they both were denied because we called too late in the finacial year). i think we wound up getting about $10,000 from that sponsor drive. and this is in an isolated (8 hours drive to the nearest city) city of 1.5million people.

oh yeah, if you are going to do this you will get the most results when the big companies have just laid out thier anual budgets.

[Greg H]

Talk to your college. Our dean is very supportive of our team and gives us a large portion of our funding. You will probably get the best results if you put together a budget at the beginning of the year and detail all of your projected spending and income as well as travel and machine shop use. We submitted a detailed report this year and that got us an additional $5000. Just something to think about.

PS. If the dean wants to drive the car, get his ass in the car!

[jonno]

Greg's right,
The University are by far our greatest sponsor (it helps that there is a relatively new MSc in motorsport engineering just kicked off) however, I can't stress how much we are indebted to them. In return we do all we can for the university. We probably do in excess of 10 functions "on campus", such as openings of buildings, honorary lectures, graduations etc.
In addition, your engineering department should really be pushing & promoting the competition, your formula car is a massive promotional tool for them. In terms of promotional events for the department, Brunel attend Autosport & Goodwood: and the benefits are mutual. the team gets to attend these events, but the university also gets top engineers on the stand promoting the university & the course.
This year we set out a financial proposal a few months back now, had some concrete designs, a realistic timing plan and our finances were approved. Like Greg said, it's all about keeping people onside and in the loop, we're planning a sponsors drive day in BR-4, BR-5 & BR-6 (when it's finished) next summer