How Do You Make Money?
Sponsorship Opportunities
Over the last six years, our library clients have been successful securing sponsorships in excess of over $20,000 by offering multiple ways to support the Library Mini Golf event. The vast majority of sponsorships fall into one of six categories:
Title Sponsor
Hole Sponsors
Fairway Sponsors
Raffle Sponsors
Silent Auction Sponsors
Services Sponsors
Title Sponsor
You’re probably aware that most professional golf tournaments have a title sponsor such as the Honda Classic, Sony Open, and the AT & T National Pro-Am. Many of our library clients have also found a company to make a substantial contribution to be the title sponsor. It’s very hard to get as much advertising value any other way since with a good publicity effort, everyone in town will be hearing about the your Library Mini Golf event for many weeks prior to the actual date. Title sponsorships should be offered at between $1,500 and $5,000 depending on your locale. Look to banks, financial services companies, utilities, large retailers or the largest local employer as your best targets for the title sponsorship.
Hole Sponsors
A large percentage of your sponsorship revenue will likely come from hole sponsorships. You can offer a local business an entire hole or you can seek two sponsors per hole: one for the tee and the other for the green. The most common amount our previous clients have asked is between $250 to $750 for an entire hole or $150 to $500 for a tee or a green. A good benchmark price for a hole sponsorship can be determined by using your local weekly paper as a guideline. Find out what a 1/8 page ad costs for a week and you are probably at the right amount for your hole sponsorships. If you are seeking both tee and green sponsors, or two per hole, go with a rate of 60% to 75% of the ad rate. Also, make sure you double the price for the first hole and the last hole if you are going with a single price for an entire hole or double the price of the 1st tee and the 18th green if you are offering tees and greens separately. There will always be much more space around the first tee and last green for sponsors to make more elaborate displays. As you talk about hole sponsorships with potential sponsors, make sure they realize that they are welcome to decorate their hole almost any way they would like. Hundreds of people seeing their company name and marketing materials is an enormous advertising value. Ask them to compare what they pay for a small ad for a single week in the local paper versus the effect their hole sponsorship will make. To double the value, try to get the local paper to run a full page ad at no cost as a public service for any company that advertises with them and becomes one of your sponsors. It’s a great way for the newspaper to support the event and thank their regular advertisers at very little cost. Also, consider setting up one hole as the library vendor hole. You spend a large amount of money with book publishers, database companies, audio book and movie providers, etc. They have marketing departments with funds to spend on exactly this type of event. A quick call to your regular sales people will cause them to call their marketing people and marketing won’t often turn them down, especially if you are only seeking $50 to $100 per vendor. But if you can line up 6 to 15 vendors for this one idea, you have a very lucrative hole.
Fairway sponsors
Even though many past sponsors have told us they think supporting a Library Mini Golf event was a great value for them, a title or hole sponsorship may be more money than some businesses, organizations, or individuals are able to spend. Fairway sponsorships are a great alternative. The most effective way for a business or organization to take advantage of this idea is for them to place one or more obstacles on the fairway. It could be something they sell. We have seen some amazing sponsorships from Dunkin’ Donuts where they built pyramids of coffee boxes; a farm cooperative that covered their hole with fresh produce; a florist that placed several arrangements in non-breakable containers on the fairway; and Lego running a contest at local schools to build the most interesting obstacle for the hole. These were all full hole sponsorships, but it gave us the idea that the obstacles themselves could be sponsorship opportunities. For a service company whose business may not lend itself to something physical, a simple poster mounted on a foam core board set up on an easel can be very effective. For individual benefactors, a large sign should suffice. Fairway sponsorships can be priced at $10 to $25 per obstacle or $50 to $100 for any reasonable number for the entire hole.
Raffle
Holding a raffle during the event is an excellent way to add a lot of revenue to the day and some of our past clients have realized several thousand extra dollars from their raffle. We think raffles work best when you have a lot of simple items that almost everyone can use anchored by at least one grand prize. It lets you have a lot of winners of useful, less expensive prizes along with the allure of someone winning the big one. One of our past Massachusetts clients was able to get more than a dozen of the top players on the New England Patriots to sign a football to be used as the grand prize. A call to the Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins, and/or Celtics public relations departments may be all it takes to get one for your event. (Note: For the record, we don’t consider there to be any other professional teams in the four major sports to be of any value whatsoever, but we appreciate that outside of New England, people can differ on this subject.)
Silent Auction
Many of our clients have run both a raffle and a silent auction at the same time and they can be very complementary. Raffles seem to work best for physical items that are not very expensive except for the grand prize, while silent auctions seem to work best for big ticket items and professional services. To start, try to talk to most of the restaurants in town. Many will be glad to offer dinner for four or at least 2 for 1 coupons for you to use as silent auction items. And don’t forget to talk to all the local professionals. We have had attorneys offer a free will for the silent auction and accountants offer a free tax preparation. The highest value we have seen offered was a full, 3-year program of orthodontics, which was taken for $2,000. It was a great value for the winner and $2,000 more for the library. Auto dealers can give you a free tune up or oil change. Think about all the services people use regularly. You’ll almost always get 50% to 75% of the normal retail value and the cost to the business will be far less and might get them a new client.
Services at your event
This category covers a lot of ideas we have seen work, but the most common idea involves food. At most of our events, the library has set up a simple food service for breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks. If you are running a two-day event, with an evening program followed by a full day, the evening food and beverage service can be a major part of the revenue. We have had clients charge $50 to $75 per person with over 200 attendees for these evening programs. For the day programs, we’ve seen hundreds of parents bring the kids to the library for mini golf for the day knowing that they could get them lunch at the same time. Coffee and donuts for the early hours of the day and cookies and snacks late in the day always work well. A simultaneous bake or candy sale has also been effective at many of our events. But the key is to try not to pay for any of the food. Many local supermarkets or wholesale clubs will be glad to give you a $25 to $100 shopping card to use as you see fit as long as they get proper attribution. Alternatively, seek a local restaurant willing to cater the event in exchange for the publicity. We recently hosted an event where a local Italian restaurant took care of all the food at no cost to the library; let the library keep the revenue; and the food was amazing. While not ideal, you can also arrange for the caterer to pay you a flat fee for the right to be your food resource and they keep the revenue. If you just don’t have the space in your building, any local food truck will be thrilled to be invited to set up in your parking lot. Also, consider conducting a “pancake breakfast” the morning of the event. This generates additional revenue plus it gives people another reason to attend your golf event. This strategy also gets the library early morning players.
Other than food, there are a host of services you can offer during the Library Mini Golf event. We’ve seen all of the following:
Face painting
Washable tattoos
Video golf lessons from the local pro
Professional neck, back and foot massages
Manicures and pedicures
Arcade games
Caricatures and portraits
Arts and crafts
For some of these activities that are more for the kids, you may or may not want to charge extra, but for the adult-oriented services, you should probably charge an amount that makes it a very good value, especially since your cost should be zero and volume will likely be more important than a slightly higher price.
A typical result for a library serving a community of 10,000 to 30,000 residents is as follows:
Revenue |
|||
Golf Related Sponsorship |
Donation Amount |
Range |
|
1st Tee |
$750 |
$500 – $1000 |
|
Holes 2-17, $400 each |
$6400 |
$4800 – $8000 |
|
Last Green |
$750 |
$500 – $1000 |
|
Subtotal: $7900 |
Subtotal: $5800 – $10,000 |
||
Title Sponsor |
$2000 |
$1500-$5000 |
|
Putting Green |
$500 |
$300-$750 |
|
19th Hole |
$500 |
$300-$750 |
|
Subtotal: $3000 |
Subtotal: $2100 – $6500 |
||
Tickets 400, $5.00 each |
$2000 |
$1000 – $3000 |
|
Silent Auction/Raffle
|
$2500 |
$1500 – $15,000 |
|
Golf Items Sub-Total: $17,400 |
$10,400 – $34,500 |
||
Non-Golf Sponsorship |
|||
Food and Beverage |
$1,000 |
$500-$1,500 |
|
Other Services |
$750 |
$500-$1,500 |
|
Non-Golf Items Sub-Total: $1,750 |
$1000 – $3000 |
||
Total Gross : $19,150 |
$11,400 – $37,500 |
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