An Interview with Omaha Entrepreneurs SponsorPark

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Many people, business owners included, will have absolutely no need for the service SponsorPark provides. But for certain individuals and organizations, SponsorPark will be a revelation—the perfect company offering the perfect set of tools.

The Omaha based start-up is one of the few websites specializing in the emerging field of sponsor matching, and their tagline pretty much sums up their mission: supporting people’s passions by connecting sponsors to sponsorship opportunities.

We interviewed SponsorPark co-founder and Director of Business Development Emily Taylor about this local business with national reach, learning about their unique services and potential for growth.

Who needs SponsorPark?

All kinds of business and non-profit efforts can be candidates for sponsorship. Innovative programs & events and the people behind them, whether they be individuals or businesses, often need sponsorship to help get off the ground and defray expenses. SponsorPark works as a conduit between sponsors and opportunities: they don’t negotiate deals, but they do match clients with partners that would otherwise expend a lot of precious resources finding each other.

For sponsors: a site like SponsorPark helps take some of the strain off of overworked staff inundated with sponsorship requests.

• Sponsors are able to browse opportunities as a FREE service, beginning with broad searches based on geography, cost, and demographics before targeting the specific sponsees that interest them most.
• The site is available 24/7, cutting sponsors loose from the phone and the 9 – 5 workday. 

Sponsors are able to proactively review targeted sponsorship opportunities by searching according to their specific criteria. This keeps sponsors educated, competitive, and operationally efficient as they consider their marketing options.

For a sponsees: sponsor-seekers benefit from a well-researched seven step process, streamlining sponsorship proposal and taking some of the guess work out of honing a pitch.

• SponsorPark offers a FREE basic listing for sponsees (limited to 500 characters), but most opt for one of the Premium one page listings—the $150 annual price promotion (half off the normal price) or $29.95 monthly (first month is half off at $14.98) is quite reasonable considering the potential for landing a sponsor
• The Professional service is a cost effective choice for managing multiple sponsorship opportunities, up to 10
• Opportunities will be listed within 24 hours of creation

Sponsorship opportunities are able to create foundational/informative proposal listings and are found through targeted searches—making them the squeaky wheel with the most appropriate sponsors.

SponsorPark went through almost a year of beta testing, focusing on building their list of sponsorship opportunities and learning about the common mistakes sponsees were making in their sponsorship proposals—communicating the wrong information, lacking demographics—to better guide them through the sponsor search process.

Sponsorship is a growing part of advertising, both here in Omaha and nationally, with anywhere from $15 – 17 billion committed annually by sponsors. Of this, $6 – 9 billion are represented at the annual IEG Sponsorship Conference, a $1,900 per person gathering that SponsorPark attends regularly to continue to grow the more than 3,000 US-based sponsors it markets to.

SponsorPark is currently trying to create more awareness of the unique services they offer, targeting the marketing decision makers within brands and the sponsorship opportunity representatives working for potential sponsees. They view themselves as a valuable “tool in the toolbelt” for both potential sponsors and sponsees, “providing best practice education, consulting, and connection support.”

Despite being Omaha based, most of their traffic comes from traditional coastal markets—New York, Miami, San Francisco,  and San Diego—and Texas. Still, they wish to grow healthy roots in Omaha: “with trying economical times, entrepreneurs keep growth and development alive in a city—which is where we’re hiring out of.” In fact, they are on the look out to hire a qualified sales representative right now! 

Opportunities as low as $100 are featured on the site, but most popular are sponsorship proposals in the $10,000 – 100,000 range. Because online integration for the services SponsorPark offers is relatively new, competition is fairly sparse: their main competitors include Sponsor Pitch, which exists mainly as a video platform, and Hookit.com (formerly Sponsorhouse), which focuses almost exclusively on the extreme sports niche.

Recently, Cox Classic worked with SponsorPark on a successfully securing a new sponsor. Clearly, SponsorPark is poised to expand in this lucrative marketing category. They may have national goals—even international—but don’t be surprised if they are working behind the scenes of your favorite Omaha events, connecting sponsors to opportunities and, like us here at Omaha.net, “supporting people’s passions.”

An Omaha.net writer since 2008, Jordy freely admits he's waiting for his golden parachute "anxiously." He microblogs @jordyclements + macroblogs jordyclements.com