Sponsorship Ready is a professional development and capacity building program, with an unwavering solutions-based approach to sponsorship in schools.
While it can be difficult to put a dollar figure on the awareness or community-building aspects of social media in schools, there is one area that’s easy to quantify: sponsor acquisition and retention.
- DO YOUR RESEARCH
Before you can effectively engage new or existing sponsors; you need to know what your social media presence can offer them. Start with the following questions:
- How many social media followers do we have?
Understanding the number of followers on your school’s social media supports in defining how engaged your audience is when reviewing your page insights and data,
- What’s our social media reach?
Using Facebook Insights, schools can define top posts that deliver the most reach for your school’s Facebook page. See what content works well and how you can best leverage your data to create sponsorship driven content. - What are my audience’s demographics?
Knowing your social audience’s age, gender and location helps schools identify where their most valuable audiences lie and can be a useful tool to leverage when seeking sponsorship at your school.
- How does my school stack up against similar school social media pages?
Through the Benchmarking tool located in Facebook Insights, schools can compare social media performance and content with surrounding schools in their catchment and define where successes and opportunities lie.
TIP: Research your existing sponsors social media presence. If a sponsor doesn’t have a strong following, therein lies and opportunity for your school to support in driving reach and engagement. On the flipside, sponsors with a strong social media presence can compliment and support what your school is already doing online.
- MAKE A PLAN
Inviting your school sponsors to work with you and define your social media plan maximises involvement and helps schools understand precisely what your sponsors hope to accomplish through the sponsorship.
Plus, it’s an opportunity to come up with creative ways to meet sponsor’s needs.
- SHARE YOUR SPONSOR’S MESSAGES
An easy and simply way to provide social media benefit to school sponsors is to re-post and share their content. This not only a great way to drive recognition for your sponsors, it’s also an effective way to keep your social audience highly engaged and informed. This can also be appetising for prospective students and families looking to enrol at a new school. Make sure you refer to them as Sponsors!
- CREATE MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL CONTENT
Creating social media content that benefits both your school and its sponsors can take your school sponsorship to the next level.
- Sharing organic photo and video content that showcases the good work a sponsor is doing in their community and their support of the school while increasing the reach of your school’s social media content.
- You can also offer your sponsors exclusivity in a type of content. Just ensure transparency. For example, if your school posts a monthly style series of content i.e. “Student of the Month”, perhaps this content is sponsored by a sponsor that includes their logo and branded messaging.
- Invite your sponsors to engage with your social audience by providing blog style content for your school’s website
- TELL A STORY
Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to engage your social audience and provides ample opportunity to create content that aligns with your school and sponsors values. One of the best ways to convey storytelling is through video and blog style content.
- EXPRESS GRATITUDE
Like most of us, your school sponsors like to feel appreciated. It doesn’t take much effort to post of photo of students (with appropriate approvals) in front of their signage that showcases them as a sponsor. If your sponsors support a specific program at your school, there lies an opportunity to further personalise your thank you messaging that link backs to the positive outcomes for students supported by your sponsors.
- SHARE YOUR RESULTS
Share social media successes with your sponsors through Facebook Insights. It’s a great opportunity to showcase results of sponsor driven content and for your school to review reach, shares, likes and increase in followers to refine and define what compelling sponsor content looks like for your school’s social media.
Ultimately, the key to successful sponsorship at your school is in providing value for both your school and its associated sponsors.
Sponsorship Ready’s leading and proven 3-step framework provides peace of mind for school’s wanting to successfully deliver on business, brand, and community engagement objectives for their sponsors, while effectively conveying their school’s purpose, vision, and values.
Find out how your school can become Sponsorship Ready with a FREE 30-minute strategy session and start succeeding in sponsorship at your school today.