I probably should just let this lie, but I hate to see a fellow FOTer walking
into a buzz saw.
Having done marketing for most of my adult life, I'll tell you that's a lot of
work for $5K. And that's not because marketers are overpaid--it's work even
when you're good at it. If you could do a catered hospitality tent for that
then more power to you, never mind the rest. I've done a race for two years
(the Columbia River Classic here in Portland) and acquired sponsors for
charity. We collected about $50K in sponsorships and counted ourselves lucky
to clear $10K for the charity. Even though we had food donations we didn't
have enough, and people went hungry. Good thing we had lots of Kona beer. I
had to personally donate $5K for the raffle prize to clear that (it wasn't
unexpected). I'm not trying to discourage you, just to tell you that it's a
heck of a lot of work and more expenses everywhere than you'd expect. One
small example--most tracks have concessionaires. Doing your own catering can
be a challenge, hiring a caterer is absolutely out. You have to use the
concessionaire, and that's expensive and not good. Tracks and racing
organizations expect to get a piece of anything commercial. It's tricky to fly
under that radar without setting up a confrontation that can be very
embarrassing for your sponsor, so you have to cross all the I's and dot the
T's.
There is a book on how to manage sponsorship for racing--I never bought it but
I flipped through it. I'd start there with someone who has already gone
through the grief.
The problem with these kind of things is that there is a huge difference
between entertaining a few friends at the track informally, and trying to do
something similar for money. The stakes and the complexities rise
exponentially, and if you can't get enough budget to actually do it right,
then it fails. I've done these kind of things with professionals helping me
(indispensable) and I'm pretty good at a number of the elements myself, and
I'd tell you everything is much harder than you think, takes ten times longer
and costs five times more.
Give it a go, but be careful, and do your best not to set expectations you
can't meet.
_______________________________________________
http://www.team.net/donate.html
Fot mailing list
Fot@autox.team.net
http://autox.team.net/mailman/listinfo/fot
|