By Jennifer Wemhoff, Communications Manager at GolfStatus – the leading event management platform for golf fundraisers.
Now more than ever before, our world is online. When it comes to your nonprofit’s annual golf tournament fundraiser, leveraging digital channels throughout planning and execution is crucial to success. From promotion to registration to golfer engagement, digital tools improve fundraising outcomes and make life easier for nonprofit tournament organizers.
Digital tools are a critical part of sponsorships, which are the heart of a golf tournament’s fundraising power. Strategically designing sponsorships that include digital exposure boosts event revenue and keeps sponsors coming back year after year. Digital exposure can—and should—play a major role in your sponsorship offerings. Here are six reasons why both nonprofits and sponsors love digital.
1) It’s Premium & Professional
Bottom line, digital exposure looks great. It has a professional, high-end look and feel and premium visibility that can’t be replicated with other types of exposure.
Why Nonprofits Love It: Digital exposure gives golf tournaments standing and legitimacy, particularly for new events finding their footing. A professional, attractive event website that showcases sponsor logos provides instant credibility.
Why Sponsors Love It: Sponsors get the brand lift that comes with sponsoring a charity golf tournament. Presenting their logo and branding in a professional manner positively associates the business with a worthy cause.
2) It’s Multi-Channel & Multi-Touchpoint
The beauty of digital exposure is that it comes with touchpoints across multiple channels. With the right golf event management platform, sponsors get impressions on an event website, an accompanying mobile app, live leaderboards, push notifications, and more.
Why Nonprofits Love It: Sponsorship packages get additional value—more eyeballs and more impressions on the sponsor’s brand—with digital exposure. What’s more, with the right software tool, the logo is uploaded when the sponsor registers and instantly appears in the corresponding channels, saving organizers time-consuming back and forth collecting assets. Plus, digital channels come with more avenues to sell sponsorships.
Why Sponsors Love It: Exposure across multiple channels with multiple opportunities for engagement gives sponsors better, broader exposure and a greater ROI. Attaching digital exposure to traditional sponsorships (like hole sponsorships) adds yet an additional touchpoint.
3) It’s Extended & Far-Reaching
Unlike traditional on-course signage, digital exposure starts earning impressions as soon as the sponsor commits to the event and extends even past the tournament date.
Why Nonprofits Love It: Extended digital exposure builds even more value into sponsorship packages, making it easier for businesses to justify their support.
Why Sponsors Love It: They get broader exposure to an affluent and influential audience of golfers and other sponsors, with visibility before, during, and after the tournament. Many tournament organizers refer folks to the event website after the tournament to make a donation or see the results and outcomes.
4) It’s a Safe Bet
Digital exposure comes with less risk than many traditional sponsor perks. There’s no deadline to submit logos to have materials produced, and, even better, no extra costs involved in your sponsorship deliverables. It’s as simple as adding a logo to the event website for real-time exposure.
Why Nonprofits Love It: You’re able to sell sponsorships right up until event day. Even if you’ve sold out your sponsor packages, you can keep an unlimited number of digital hole or other types of sponsors available for purchase in the days leading up to the tournament.
Why Sponsors Love It: If a business learns about your tournament late in the game, they’re still able to jump on board to support your tournament and get valuable digital exposure.
5) It’s Shareable
Both nonprofits and sponsors can easily share information about the tournament and the business’ support to their audience, whether on social media, email campaigns, organization website, or other digital channels. Any printed pieces can use a QR code that drives offline traffic to the event site.
Why Nonprofits Love It: It’s easy to give sponsor shoutouts on social media, which can be a recruiting tool to onboard additional sponsors. When other businesses visit the event site and see who’s on board supporting it, it can prompt them to get involved.
Why Sponsors Love It: It’s also easy for businesses to spread the word about their corporate social responsibility and take advantage of the brand lift that comes with supporting your good cause.
6) It’s Flexible
Flexibility is important in planning and executing a successful golf fundraiser. Having the ability to pivot or make changes up until the last minute eases a great deal of stress, for both nonprofit event organizers and sponsors.
Why Nonprofits Love It: In the planning phase, simply send the link to your event website when making your sponsor pitches. If a business is interested in a custom sponsorship, you can create packages and get their logos online in just a few minutes. And if anything changes, sponsor logos and links can be updated with just a few simple clicks.
Why Sponsors Love It: Sponsors see the value immediately, as their logo appears on the event website as soon as they register.
Final Thoughts
Digital exposure starts with an event website, where every visit leads to more sponsor impressions. Your event site should be powered by an all-in-one tournament management platform that makes your life simpler and provides tools to leverage digital channels that improve the golf event’s fundraising outcomes.
Golf for Good With GolfStatus
GolfStatus works with nonprofits and charities of all types and sizes to launch or level up their golf fundraisers. The robust platform streamlines the process from start to finish and is backed by an in-house support team available seven days a week. Through the Golf for Good program, qualifying 501(c) organizations and others planning golf events that benefit a charity can use GolfStatus’ tournament management software at no cost, including an event website, online registration and secure payment processing, digital sponsor exposure, robust reporting, and more. Visit golfstatus.com/demo for more information or to get qualified.
