The investment into a high tech electronic scoreboard opens up many opportunities for your school. Today’s scoreboards offer an incredible array of displays, including easily changed logos, static and alternating screen shots and streaming video. Connecting to the internet can push your sponsorship to websites and social media pages, so anything that you place on your electronic scoreboard can go viral.
Historically, the typical sponsorship of an electronic keyboard has been via local businesses. Teams of volunteers hit the streets and convince a local business to invest their advertising dollars for a logo or catch line phrase. Since every company has a set budget, you might want to think about varying ‘levels’ of sponsorship. Logo placement with slogan, logo and slogan on school programs and flyers, video, video with feed to website and social media pages. Each level would be associated with an incremental pricing increase. You will want to be prepared with the potential number of anticipated ‘hits’ on the website that the sponsor may receive. You can sign your website up with the google analytics to gauge what readership the site has before, during and after a game.
If you have the video option, this can entice a potential sponsor to include a commercial spot. Some may already have a pre-recorded commercial, but if not, you can enlist the assistance of some of the school talent to film a commercial video as part of the sponsorship program.
Some schools are beginning to include ‘spirit products’ as part of the sponsorship. These can be cups, flags, buttons or pins and anything that the fans will be purchasing. Cups can include the school logo and slogan along with the sponsor logo and slogan. You can coordinate with the food and drink teams so that everyone that pays $1 more can get their drink in a ‘spirit cup’. Giving the potential sponsor the average attendance of the game along with the idea that everyone will be carrying a cup or flag with their logo is an excellent return on investment concept. If previously done, you can film a crowd displaying all of the cups, buttons, flags, etc. This is an excellent visual for the sponsor as they will now envision their own logo attached to fan attendance.
You probably already have computer, internet and web design geeks at the school. These are the people that have the wonderful talent of being able to accomplish ad hoc web sites and internet magic. Enlist some of your local people to code a smartphone app for your school website. 75% of the people in the U.S. currently have smartphones and supportive fans can download the app. You may want to attach a minimal price to the app or offer it to the sponsor as part of one of the advertising opportunities with a video posted on the electronic scoreboard update section of the website.
Make use of the internet services such as YouTube to post a sponsor video. This is a free service and, as long as you don’t include copy written (non-approved) music as an attachment, you will be fine. You can record the video with music playing in the background and that seems to be acceptable.
There are a number of non-traditional opportunities for your electronic scoreboard that will attract fans and put a smile on the faces of the sponsors.