Everything you need to know to get started with sponsorship

1. Sponsorship Pipeline
   1. Differentiate your event
   2. Find Sponsors/ Email
   3. Phone Calls
   4. After the phone calls
2. Sponsorship Tiers
3. Tools
4. Some pro-tips
5. Resources

Before you email sponsors, make sure you have a clear intention on how you want to pitch your sponsors about how your hackathon is different from many others. (e.g. more diversity focus?)

• Prospect:build a really really long prospect list (some stats: for most hackathon, 50 cold emails = 1 final sponsor. At nwHacks, they have a sponsorship team of 4 people, and at the end of the fundraising season, each one of their liaison has sent out at least 500 emails. At MadHacks we sent out about 150 emails last hackathon season for around $30000)
• Start with people you know: coworkers, school alumni, friends, parents, former hackers / organizers.
  • Email template to friend: “Hey Jane, I am putting on this event on campus called madhacks. I know we talked about how much you wished you were part of a tech community when you were a student. I’d love to find a way to get you involved as a sponsor.”
• Then, Companies that you know something about: API/Product you've used, places you’ve interviewed, etc
  • Email template: “Hey Sam, I am a huge fan of Twilio’s API. I actually build this project recently that lets my friend text into a number to see what board game we are playing at game night each week. I’d love to talk to you at some point about promoting Twilio at our upcoming hackathon. I think our students would get as excited about it as I did. Do you have time for a call next week?”
• Cold contacts: companies in the news, large companies, companies who sponsored many hackathons, name brand companies (least likely to respond, but largest volume of options)
  • career website: use the school career fair to find companies who already sponsored your school’s career fair.
  • People who you should contact (in that order): University Recruiter, Technical Recruiter, Lead Recruiter, Recruiter, Developer Relations, Program Manager, IT Manager, HR Manager, Software Engineer, CTO(if it's a small startup)
  • Cold email templates: “Hey Mike, I don’t think we’ve met but I am Aiden, a student at University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am organizing an upcoming event on campus called a hackathon. It’s kind of like a weekend-long invention marathon. I saw that Capital One has been launching a lot of cool new tech products. Do you do any on-campus recruiting for your tech teams? Our hackathon would be an amzing place to meet some potential applicants! Let me know if you have any time to discuss next week. I’d love to talk more!”
  • Cold emails always have a very low response rates. Remember, your sponsors received hundreds of emails every day. Try to personalize the first impression email. DON’T SEND THEM YOUR SPONSORSHIP DECK!(Unless it's past sponsors) The goal of the cold email is to try to get on a phone call with your sponsor. Very unlikely will they look at your deck and just decide to give you 10000 dollars. If your sponsor don’t respond to your initial email, send 2-3 email followup if you don't get any reply (2-3 is pretty standard, and usually people don’t get annoyed, beyond 3 emails are tricky but some hackathons have tried the approach of keep emailing until they respond).
    • First followup: “Hi John, if this isn’t a good fit, is there someone else on your team who might be good to chat with about our hackathon? Thanks a lot!” Your goal is to invoke them to take actions. People love to help when they know how to help.
    • Second followup: “ Hi John, just want to reach out again in case you missed my last email. Let me know if you have any question."
    • Third followup: “Hey John, When will you be available to talk? We’d still love to work with you!”
  • Typically, you want your email to be on top of their inbox. Some people said Monday morning at 8 am is the best since most people check their email the first thing when they come back to work. Some other hackathons (VendyHacks) said they found Tuesday and Thursday morning at 8am to be more effective. A good strategy is to divide your mailing list to half and half, test the time and compare the open and respond rate for the two batches.
  • A good strategy to do emailing is use a Excel spreadsheet. CRM(Customer Relation Management) is cool but almost all the hackathons still use a spreadsheet to keep track of a sponsor contact list. Then each liaison can pick who they want to contact.
  • Pro-Tip: name dropping can be effective. It’s different from a referral where you just mention someone’s name (E.g. My friend Jon Smith was telling me how much he enjoyed interning at GitHub.). It probably won’t land you a deal but it will increase your response rate.
  • Pro-Tip: Reach out to school alumni also increase response rate. That person doesn't have to be a recruiter but if s/he is an engineer, s/he probably knows someone on the recruiting team.
  • Last strategy: Pretend you know them: If you really want to contact a sponsor but just can't find his/her email. Call the company phone and leave them a voice mail. Or if the front desk picks up the phone, pretend that you knows him/her, "Does James Smith still work here? It's interesting cause I just call her number and got somebody else's voicemail. Would you be able to provide me her new phone number/Would you be able to transfer me to her line?"

• Now you find your sponsors and they agree to get on a phone call with you. What do you need to say?
• Sponsors are like investors. Tell them your vision, give them your website, information about when it is and where it is, other sponsors that are coming (companies don’t want to miss out on good stuff, if KFC hear that McDonald is coming, they probably don’t want to miss out too. )
• What exactly do you need to say during the phone call?
  • Remember, you are selling your hackathon, but you are also building relationship. Don’t just read through the different tiers that you have.
    • The first part of the phone call, you need to ask them questions. (Do you know what a hackathon is? Have your companies sponsor any hackathon in the past? etc) TAKE NOTES ON WHAT THEY SAID! (E.g. Domino might say we are looking to hire some software engineer for our IT team)
      • Template: Ask them if they know what a hackathon is, if they say no, then "From our perspective, a hacakthon is a weekend long invention marathon where programmers, designers, and makers collaborate to build technology prototypes. Students come together, they pitched each other ideas for what they want to build for the course of the weekend, then they formed team organically based on the skillsets each of the project required, and they spend the next 24 hours actually buildng the functionaing prototypes of their ideas. And the whole weekend concludes with a wonderful science fair kind of expo where students are eligible to demonstrate their project in front of judges, and are eligible to win prizes.
    • The second part:
      1. repeat what they just said, even in the exact same word. They will not remember! And repeating it will give them validation. (e.g. The Domino example, you can say MadHacks will be a great place for you to hire software engineer for your IT team because a large number of our engineers want to stay in the Midwest after they graduate, etc)
      2. Attention/ Credibility: Talk about your team / your school’s culture to establish your credibility. Find one piece of info about the prospect or company to mention on your call.
      3. Educate them!!! Explain what a hackathon is, how and why they should get involved. (e.g. UPS was saying that they sent 3 recruiters to hack the north, waste a lot of money but the ROI is not worth it. Your job is to educate them and give them stories on how they can get involved. “It’s often intimidating for a college student to find a job right after they graduate. They often want to work with or for someone they already know or trust. Sending more engineers could allow them to mentor the participants, and when they are looking for a job, they would want to work for your company because of their interaction with xxx.”
      4. What’s in it for me? Make it clear what they are getting out of the event. This is when you can briefly tell them about the tier, and of course you will send them the tier later when you are following up with them.
    • Be prepared for them with objections
      • Strategy:
        1. acknowledge their objection: I understand that you haven't attended hackathon in the past as a recruiting mechanism.
        2. confirm they are not unique/alone: Other sponsors we've worked with have told us that before MadHacks, they primarily sponsored career fairs on campus, but weren't getting enough students interested in their tech roles.
        3. allows you to disagree: What we've found is that the most engaged tech students at UW-Madison attend hackathons in their spare time, rather than career fair.
    • Give them a deadline. If you don’t get it to us by certain date, you will not be able to come.
    • Make it easy for them to say yes

• write them an email to thank them for the phone call. Send the sponsor package. Tell them the deadline again in the email!
• If it’s a sponsor who does not have any hackathon experience, send a booklet or slide show (that explains what a hackathon is, etc), keep in under 10 slides.
• If it’s a sponsor like Microsoft or Google, then just send them your tier
• If they say yes:
  • send them the contract and have them sign contract! VERY IMPORTANT!
  • last year(2018) we didn't have them sign contract and one of them almost bailed on us
• If they say no:
  • thank them and send them event pictures/ videos to make them jealous (jk)
  • still be respectful and try again next year :)

• You only need 3 tiers: 1 reasonable, 1 moderate, 1 expensive
• sponsors will value whatever you said that is valuable
• Always under-promise and over deliver (tell your sponsors that they will be 400 people instead of 500. Don't sell the best-case scenarios. Sell the average case or even the worst case!)
• Always be willing to negotiate but also need to be fair to other sponsors!
• Other Hackathon tiers/booklet
• MadHacks 2018 booklet

1. Stalking people: LinkedIn is your friend! LinkedIn has a limit on how many people you can search per month, but there is a hack!

2. Getting People emails:

   • Almost none of them is free :( But they always give you first 5 free per email, so you can just keep creating new account.
   • Usually there is not one that always works, but these are some of them that we've used in the past:
     • Lusha Chrome Extension: usually very accurate if it can find it
     • Interseller CRM (also has Chrome Extension): gives good guess
     • Norbert: gives really good guess. First 50 is free
     • Hunter.io: not very accurate email but gives a good guess sometimes
     • Anymail finder: never used it but heard it's good

3. CRM: can use for email tracker, schedule emails, create marketing campaign, etc

   • Hubspot: free but not great
   • Interseller: MLH recommends using this one. It's expensive tho! $100/user/month

1. Know what sponsors want:

• They want diversity
• They want you ROI(Return On Investment) => recruitment, brand marketing, developer relations
• They want you to deliver everything you sold them
• They want to know what to expect
• They want you to surprise them (in a good way)
• They want to feel special (e.g. we send epic the proposal and they decide to sponsor right away)

2. Stay organized and consistent
   • Have a masterspreadsheet and put all the sponsors/contacts you have.
   • Every Tues/Wed/Thurs: schedule emails to send at 8 in the morning in whichever timezone they are in
3. Set a goal! It's important to know how much you want to raise so you can stop after you've got to your goals
4. Use [email protected] when sending your email, and don't forget to track your email!

1. The Sponsorship Playbook: good read on how to do sponsorship right
2. MLH Sponsorship Process