December 7, 2021

Matt Wright

When organizing events, the biggest roadblock can be funding. Here's how you can organize your sponsors behind a vision from hackathons to meetups to large conferences.

1/ Planning your execution

This is hard to measure and can come from a lot of places. Before organizing an event, one should think about their target demographic, the vibe they want to set for the event, and the desired outcome. You should visualize yourself executing this event before you even get started. This will help set the tone for who you're bring on board, where you focus your time, and realistically how you put all the pieces together.

(e.g. Ok, I'm organizing an NFT art gallery with top tier web3 companies (be specific), influencers (what kind?), and artists (what's their exact profile))

Once you are able to establish your target market of both guests/community—you're ready to understand who will want the attention of those folks.

2/ Finding the right sponsors

Finding sponsors is sales. If you yourself wouldn't purchase this sponsorship—it's probably not going to sell to someone else. It's your job to pull out the key information, the desired KPIs and metrics that your potential financier would find of value. It's also important to identify the specific category of sponsor as (1) they will find your community the most valuable and cause the least hassle and (2) other sponsors in that category are likely to join knowing their in good company.

For example, if you're running a DeFi hackathon—you're not going to go reach out to a bunch of healthcare brands. They don't gain any specific value by being around 100+ software developers building DeFi applications. Not to mention, no DeFi company will sponsor an event that brought in a random sponsor just for the sake of funding—you lose all credibility this was. However, this demographic is extremely sought after to a whole lot of other companies... In this case, one could go scrape all past defi hackathons on Gitcoin, ETH Global, Devcon, ETHDenver—you name it... and reach out to past sponsors or similar companies.

If you're running a Taco DAO Meetup and need funding, figure out who would find it valuable to have 50-100 tech savvy, community-centric, crypto-native individuals around their brand? Perhaps it's a web3 DAO tooling project that just received funding from their community. It's best to stay focused on a specific category for sponsors that (1) have known budgets, (2) find your community valuable (e.g. you two share a target demographic), and (3) you have effectively communicated the ROI/KPIs/OKRs from your event. In all, knowing which companies, DAOs, organizations are is a large majority of the battle.

• E.g. more sponsors are likely to sponsor if they know they're getting X developer engagement for their Y$ sponsorship. It's easier to measure and get approval within organizations than "it's going to be awesome!"*

3/ Creating Value

Ok, so now know who to reach out to, who will be valuable to your community and who will find value in your community. At this point, we need to create value in the form of deliverables and metrics.