How to Sell More School Broadcast Sponsorships with a Rate Card

Schools that broadcast events on the NFHS Network can generate even more revenue for their programs with advertising. Sponsorships are a powerful way to build your brand, strengthen relationships with other organizations in your community, and create more revenue streams for your school. In addition to receiving revenue share from streaming subscriptions, schools keep 100% of advertising sales. 

Broadcast sponsorships are great opportunities for both sponsors and schools. Ads are valuable for sponsors because streaming viewership is skyrocketing. Your broadcasts attract a captive audience of people in your community who are target customers for many local businesses. Your school can easily benefit from monetizing this offering. 

Many schools often see the value in broadcast advertising but don’t know where to start. We’ve created this guide to help you design a winning rate card to secure more sponsorships.

Rate Card Overview

A rate card is a document that outlines all the sponsorship options and prices, along with the details about what a sponsor receives when they order. Your school will use a rate card to help communicate with sponsors and show the benefits of your broadcast sponsorship opportunities. 

A representative from your school can speak with potential sponsors in person or remotely by email or phone. The decision-maker will likely be the owner or manager of a business. When contacting decision-makers, you’ll need to convey the value of your sponsorships quickly and effectively with your rate card.

Design Your Rate Card

The rate card will be used during the sponsor sales process when a representative from your school interacts with a decision-maker at a business that you target in order to ask them to sponsor your program.

A good rate card is simple to read. You should include your school logo, contact information, an overview of sponsorship options, pricing, and instructions on how to order. 

Try not to overwhelm the reader with details. Provide just enough information so they can quickly understand what you’re offering and how to get started.

Elements of a Successful Rate Card

Logo

Include your school logo on the rate card to establish branding and professionalism. No need to reinvent the wheel or spend unnecessary resources on design when the logo does a great job itself. Be sure to use a high-quality image to ensure your logo isn’t distorted or blurry.

Headline

Accentuate what your sponsorship program is all about with a headline at the top of a page.

Value Proposition

A value proposition is defined as an innovation, service, or feature intended to make a company or product attractive to customers. In other words, it’s a short phrase that helps your target know why they should order. Here’s a great example for video ads at a high school: “Support Centennial High School Football and get seen by thousands of fans weekly.”

Sponsorship Opportunities

There are three elements to include when you outline your sponsorship opportunities. 

• First, include a title of the product. For example, call it a featured sponsor or logo backer. Use something that stands out and sounds professional. 
  
  
• Second, include a description that outlines what a sponsor receives and where the sponsorship will go in the production. 
  
  
• Last, include a price. People will need to know what it costs prior to ordering. 

Try to list at least three sponsorship opportunities. Offer different tiers for pricing and assets. The higher the price, the more variety and value your sponsor should receive.

How to Order

Include a link to buy now if you are offering online purchasing. We encourage you to process orders online if possible because it’s efficient for both the sponsor and your school. Making it easy to purchase also improves your chances to get orders. If you’re not offering online orders, then include specific instructions for sponsors regarding payment and submitting creative assets.

Deadline

Include a deadline to order. This helps increase sales and allows more time for planning.

Messaging

Specify that this is a school-sponsored campaign with your messaging. Your school is prominent in the community. Make sure sponsors understand that this is a school initiative. Generally, businesses want to support the school.

The elements above cover the essential elements of a rate card, but you can certainly customize yours as you see fit. 

Pro Tip: To view an example rate card, check out our recent post on How to Define Your School's Event Broadcasting Ad Inventory. 

Use a Rate Card to Sell Sponsorships in Person or Remotely

Visualize how you will use your rate card during the design process. The general purpose of a rate card is to have something to show and talk about when you communicate with your target contacts.

Using Your Rate Card in Person

When you walk in to speak with an owner or operator at a local business, the best-case scenario is that you get to speak with them right there and then. However, this isn’t always feasible. Oftentimes the appropriate contact is busy and requests that you leave some information and follow up later. Most sales happen when following up, not on the initial effort of outreach. 

With that said, make sure your advertising rate card is designed well enough so you can leave a copy behind and then follow up with a call or email later. That means you’ll also need to have more than one copy of your rate card. Expect to print out copies of the rate card so you can successfully walk in and engage with different businesses.

Using Your Rate Card in Email

Emailing businesses is a great way to get the word out about your sponsorship opportunities and also distribute your rate card. You’ll need a digital copy of your rate card to attach to an email to introduce the sponsorship opportunity. Again, the ideal outcome would be that a business owner reads your email and immediately signs up to order a sponsorship. This doesn't happen often on your first campaign. However, you can get there as you run your sponsorship sales campaign year after year.  

The most likely outcome is that some business contacts will respond to your email and ask to meet in person or jump on a phone call to learn more about your sponsorship programs. The success of your sale will be in following up. The role of the rate card is to help educate the potential customer on the opportunities and sponsorship levels, to look professional, and to seed their understanding about how to get involved.

Using Your Rate Card on Social & Web

Another way to use your advertising rate card is by publishing it on social media and/or on your website. For schools that have an active social media following and who do a great job managing their website, posting the rate card with a dedicated page or post can be another fantastic way to drive traffic to your campaign and ideally get more businesses involved in ordering sponsorships.  

Often schools start by posting the rate card and campaign information on their website. Then, they use walk-in, email, and social efforts to drive traffic to the webpage for information. Following up is important in all three distribution methods. Try to capture cell and email contacts for potential businesses. Then, you can push them to the webpage to order or get more information.

Next Steps

To learn more about how your school can benefit from broadcasting and advertising, contact us for more information.