Opinion: Small business sponsorship warms heart

I recently received an email wanting me to buy tickets in a massive annual lottery.

The tickets are pricey, but the prizes are incredible.

Who wouldn’t want to win a new house or car?

Generally, I buy a ticket because the group selling them is relevant to an illness that affects our family.

With these huge raffles becoming more and more common, what happens to those small groups trying to raise funds for their causes?

They don’t have the advertising power to attract top sponsorship and to encourage ticket buyers.

Many smaller community groups also need sponsorship for other reasons, including running conferences, sending kids to school camps, getting new equipment for their school, and many others.

Large corporations and companies must receive endless requests for sponsorship, and they can’t help everyone.

That’s fair enough but what about when you need sponsorship and you just know the big corporations probably won’t even see your request? Who do you turn to then to raise funds?

In the past eight months or so I have been the convenor of a conference to be held in a couple of weeks. As it is for a voluntary organisation, sponsorship is a vital tool to enable the conference to be affordable for our members to attend.

Because it’s held in the city, we need sponsorship support to cover costs of a venue, conference package, AV, printing, accommodation for those running the organisation and other expenses.

This enables us to keep the cost of conference registration affordable.

After a meeting to brainstorm sponsorship ideas, we set to work to contact businesses we thought might be able to assist us, and who would understand the importance of the work our organisation does.

We had a wonderful response to our sponsorship requests. To me, the most gratifying aspect of this was many of our sponsors are small businesses.

Times are tough for many in WA yet these small, family-owned businesses were willing to put their support behind our organisation.

We are grateful to all our sponsors, regardless of the amount they contributed, but personally I take my hat off to those small, local businesses who are willing to support a small, grassroots organisation, without expecting a large return on their investment.