I rebuilt the lot, and then I was the only one who could use it
The first real job I had in sponsorship wasn’t selling anything. It was working out what we already had. I had to piece together who was sponsoring us, who used to, what each of them had given, what we’d promised in return, and who the right person to ring actually was.
None of it sat in one place, and what there was I couldn’t rely on. There were people who knew how it all worked and were happy to tell me, which turns out not to be the same thing.
Goodwill is not a handover
I want to be fair about that, because it would be easy to tell this as a story about being left with nothing, and it wasn’t like that. The help was genuine and I was glad of it. The problem was that a description is not a record. The only version of how something worked was the version somebody could tell me, and I had no way of checking it against anything, so the club kept doing things the way they’d always been done.
What I ended up building was a spreadsheet. Four columns did most of the work: who the sponsor was, what we’d promised them, what we still had to deliver, and whether they’d paid. We didn’t often have signed agreements, so the invoices and the email trail carried most of the evidence of what had been agreed, and the spreadsheet was the one place it all sat together. It didn’t cost us anything.
I build fundraising products for clubs now, so you might expect me to tell you a spreadsheet isn’t enough. For that job it was.
What wasn’t enough was me. Almost all of the sponsorship work sat with me, so we went from having no record to having a record that one person could use. That’s better, and I was pleased with it at the time, but it isn’t finished. A system isn’t complete because one person can operate it. Somebody else on the committee has to be able to understand the records and carry on the work.
That’s the bit I’d do differently, and it wasn’t a better spreadsheet I needed. It was a second person in it.
Club Funding builds fundraising tools for clubs. They cost the club nothing to use, the fees are paid by the people buying tickets, and that’s how this gets paid for. This isn’t the pitch. Nothing above needs anything from us, and nothing above needs a platform of any kind.
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