Why is Sport Financing Important?

As the costs of running your sports team keep rising, and funding keeps falling, sports team fundraisers become more and more important every season. When you are trying to think of the best possible fundraiser ideas, obviously you'll want to consider your monetary goals and what sort of effort will be required to reach them. Sports teams need money in order to buy sports equipment and team uniforms, but not all team members can always afford these gears. Sports teams can organize fundraising events or carry out small fundraising activities that will allow them to gather enough funds to buy sports gears. Joining tournaments also cost money as the teams also need a mode of transportation to get to places where the games are being held. Here are a few tips that sports teams can use to make sure they have successful fundraisers.

Team Sponsorship/Naming Rights

Teams and individual-sport athletes can seek out sponsorship opportunities to generate revenue. For example, teams and athletes should create a mutually beneficial sponsorship package. For instance, a local business and team may enter into a sponsorship agreement for a fee, and in exchange the business will be allowed to place their logo on the team's uniform.

In addition, teams and athletes should look to create opportunities of extended utility to add value to their sponsorship packages.

• Offer an exclusive sponsorship package to ensure that the sponsor’s aims are not skewed alongside several other sponsors
• For an additional fee, teams can incorporate the sponsor’s name into the name of the team
• Create a banner with the sponsor’s logo
• Avoid entering into sponsorship agreements that could potentially degrade the teams image

Potential Fundraising Initiatives:

• Memorabilia: Athletes’ family members often love getting their hands on memorabilia. One idea is for teams to create t-shirts with a team logo and colors to be sold to athletes’ families.
• Performance-Based Fundraising: Create initiatives.  For example, athletes ask friends, family, and local business to contribute an agreed upon donation for every goal that is scored prior to the tournament.
• A Team Highlight Video: With the amount of family members that take pictures and video recordings of sporting events, the edited material could be packaged as a DVD and be sold to fans and family members.
• Garage Sale:  Sports teams can consolidate unwanted items into a team garage sale.
• Work With Local Businesses: Fundraising initiatives with local businesses can be implemented to generate goodwill in local communities. Some businesses may already have programs in place to help their community. For example, some grocery stores allow teams to sell coupons with a percentage of earnings going directly to the team.

Have a goal. It is important that all members of the sports team know the goal of the fundraiser and all of them understand the purpose of the activity. Members will be more inclined to participate if they know the goal and why it needs to be reached.

Come up with creative fundraising ideas. Now that all team members know the importance of the fundraiser, it's time they contribute their creative ideas on what kind of activities can be done during the fundraiser. Some sports teams prefer to fundraise at community events and at their own sports games or tournaments because of the high people traffic at these events. Teams can also hold a car wash day, a bake sale day, host a small concert or host a sports banquet to raise money.

Select products to sell. The items that will be sold should not only be profitable for the sports team but also useful for the people who will buy the products. It is important to keep in mind the audience you're trying to sell to.

Contact friends, family and the community. Publicity is important to any fundraiser because such an event needs to be well-attended to make sure the sports team's monetary goal is achieved. Members of the team can also contact their friends, neighbors and family to ask them to attend the fundraiser and explain the purpose of the event.

Have fun. Organizing a fundraiser can be a lot of work and very tiring, but members of the team should remember to have fun while doing the activities. They need to be motivated and enthusiastic so that they can reach their fundraising goals.