How to Get the Most Out of Your Membership

Typically we reserve our blog space for industry happenings, sponsorship education and to highlight various properties or valuable industry resources; but there’s one SponsorPark related topic we felt all of our users (both sponsors and sponsorship opportunity representatives would benefit from knowing:  how to get the most out of your membership on SponsorPark.  We want to make sure that we enable you to maximize the potential you have to generate valuable exposure, network effectively, and optimize your chances of being found; so we’re going to walk through the various outlets you might not have thought of yet; and best of all – these options are free!

1. Get active in our social networking communities: We have active communities in the following places: LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (these links might not work if you don't have an account on the service).  Any of these places you can join (or follow on twitter: @SponsorPark) and setting up your own account to start is easy.  On facebook you can introduce yourself, provide a link to your proposal, and connect with other members.  LinkedIn is probably our most active community – you can connect with other sponsorship professionals, ask questions, start discussions, introduce yourself and your listing to the group; basically network with some other brilliant and experienced individuals.  On Twitter, you can follow us to learn about the industry happenings with daily updates, and have your brand or opportunity link tweeted as well – this goes out to all of our followers which continues to grow daily.
2. Request to be featured in a blog: as you might realize, we put the “Spotlight on Sponsorship” by featuring one of our Premium or Professional level members in our blog once per month.  This piece is managed and written by Stephanie Lochmiller, and her goal is to represent a wide range of properties that we support on SponsorPark, highlighting their best practices, and essentially tell a part of their story.  It’s a great way to offer your expertise to other industry professionals, earning you credibility and point to your current efforts – though as you might imagine, this space fills up fast, so if you’re interested in being considered, contact Stephanie through one of our social media outlets ASAP.  She’ll ask you the necessary questions to determine if this is a good fit.
3. Place a link to your proposal listing on your website: One of the best ways you can personally send interested eyes to your sponsorship proposal listing is by placing a link to your listing on your website or marketing materials.  We have members ask for our logo all the time for this purpose – they’ll post our logo and a quick one or two liner stating that if interested, one can check out their sponsorship proposal listing on SponsorPark.  Ensure that the landing page attached to the hyperlink is directly to your proposal (and not to our homepage), and you’re sending people who are already interested in you – otherwise they wouldn’t be on your site, directly to your sponsorship opportunities!  Here's an example of one member who has done this: Miami Beach Antique Show.
4. Get featured on our newsletter: In our newsletter that typically goes out every couple of months, we feature 4-5 new sponsorship opportunity listings (Premium or Professional level) and sponsors.  If you’re interested in this extra exposure, just let us know and we’ll consider it.
5. Sponsors – create a saved search within your profile: LOTS of sponsors have used our service to casually browse our database of targeted listings at their discretion.  But the ones who have the most luck and are the most operationally efficient are the ones who set up a saved search profile with us, so that we automatically send them results that match as they are listed with us.  That way, you will know as soon as you have a reason to review the listings, and you’ve basically used us as your full time intern to alert you of the most relevant, valuable listings according to your interests.  Save time, create a saved search criteria.
6. Sponsorship opportunities – featured listing space: Our featured listing space runs for $99 / month – it gets the most exposure of any sponsorship listing on our site since no search is necessary for it to receive more impressions, and therefore, more clicks.  But if you’d like to offer SponsorPark some unique support by generating awareness for our resource to those in the sponsorship community, we’re open to discussing a trade.  We have been involved in sponsorship summits, sponsor “pick up” parties, been featured in email campaigns and trade shows… we’re pretty open to unique ideas if you have them.  Just contact me at: info@sponsorpark.com. 
7. Sponsorship opportunities – send us a list of sponsors you’d like exposure with: SponsorPark is always campaigning towards sponsors to ensure that they know about our resource.   In these phone calls, email campaigns, industry specific event attendance, online advertising, etc. etc… we pursue between 2,000-3,000 U.S. based sponsors who have all been active in sponsorship.  But you know best who you want to get in front of – especially if it’s locally or regionally based; and it’s to our best interest to generate awareness with sponsors that you will benefit most from getting in front of.  So send us your list (preferably with a contact name/number) and we’ll reach out to them; not only for the purpose of informing them of our resource, but also to use your proposal listing as an example of what they might see when they use our site.  Everyone wins.  Keep in mind; you must be a Premium or Professional level member to receive this benefit. 

Many of you already know that the point of using SponsorPark as a service is to complement the efforts you already have in place for connecting with sponsors.  We are offering a tool that generates targeted exposure with sponsors for your opportunity, we don’t sell sponsorships; important distinction to make.  If you’re using SponsorPark already, you’ve already taken a step to get innovative and proactive about getting noticed with a targeted audience and generating heightened exposure with an innovative tool; but we want you to capitalize on all the opportunities we make available for you.  So if you have questions about what we covered here, don’t hesitate to reach out – you can contact myself through our info@sponsorPark.com email account, or reach out to Stephanie Lochmiller (New Media Manager) through our social media efforts.  We’re hearing some great stories, and we want to add yours to our list!