How to Get Sponsorship for Mountaineering
There’s no doubt, mountaineering is expensive! Specialized guides, complicated logistics, technical and reliable gear and remote locations all add to the price tag, and the bigger the peak the more those costs rise. One option to offset the cost of climbing is to reach out and secure sponsorship for mountaineering to support your climbing efforts.
Setting up sponsorships, especially your first one, can take real work, commitment and creativity – but it’s not impossible.
Here’s some well meaning advice to help you on your quest:
You don’t have to be a professional athlete or a world record holder!
It’s often assumed that you have to be some sort of super athlete in order to attract the attention of a potential sponsor. While performing at a high level can certainly help, it’s not as important as you might think.
Well then, What DOES it take to get sponsorship for mountaineering?
Perfect question! Companies sponsor climbers ONLY when they feel like they’ll receive something valuable in return.
Just what that return is can vary from simple photos highlighting their product in the field to speaking engagements after the climb is completed.
Figuring out what you can provide and how to market yourself is what will set you apart and what the rest of this article is all about.
1. You MUST offer great ‘return on investment’ opportunities for your sponsor.
How can the money your potential sponsor is about to spend on your achievement increase their market reach, or profit margins? This is inevitably the trickiest bit but the most critical. The mistake people often make when they seek sponsorship is telling potential sponsors how great it will be, and how they should, but forgetting to tell them WHY & WHAT they will get out of spending the money.
When you write your proposals and make your pitches, the first question you need to answer is how funding your dream can help them.
Some ideas to get you started are:
- Finding creative ways to engage their audience in marketing (instagram influencing, social media takeovers, social media content (i.e summit photos with logo flags)
- Tying your goal into one of their current or future marketing campaigns and building a budget that includes having say a cameraman or documentary filmmaker join you to make sure you have great content they can use for years and years.
- Speaking engagements – Can you offer them compelling keynote addresses/workshops to motivate or educate their staff or spice up their events?
- Guest guiding a corporate incentive trip – for instance we often help our clients organise incentive trips to Everest Base Camp for their sponsors – maybe the company might send their top ten sales performers and you can be their special guest.
- Being the face of their product/business
- Offering your services in kind (whatever you can think of that you can give away) as part of a return. Are you an expert in any field that they could benefit from?
2. Think of WHY the sponsors/their audience should care about your goal. Be unique!
We are the biggest believer in our own dreams but in seeking sponsorship we need to ask why other people should/will care. Is there a unique angle or story behind your climb that you can use to rally an audience?.
For instance is there a way of motivating underserved youth with your climbs and then pitching that inspirational message to a brand that wants to engage a young market with the same messaging? Or are you relatable to a specific audience that the sponsor also wants to engage? Do you already have an audience that you can capitalize on (This can be, but doesn’t have to be a social media audience – perhaps you have access to a large group of people through your work or contacts?
Having a strong and interesting ‘angle’ and ‘why’ also helps gain media attention and when you have media attention it is much easier to secure sponsorship.
You don’t always have to have a ‘world first’ or a world record to do this, you just have to have a really strong ‘why’ and a really strong message that fits perfectly with the goals of a sponsor.
3. It’s a crowded, competitive space.
Remember that there are likely many others seeking sponsorship for mountaineering. To stand out from a crowd of applicants you really need to focus on what you can give, vs what you want.
Have a unique angle, find brands/companies and people that also want to use that unique angle to reach a bigger audience/market etc and team up with them.
It’s better to be very focused and deliberate about who you approach for sponsorship, think hard about people who need what you have to offer, and then spell it out to them very clearly.
Don’t do a huge generic send out to every brand you can find on Google. Tailored and personally addressed pitches are much more successful than a cold call or email.
4. Start Small
A sponsorship for mountaineering doesn’t have to be big. It’s easier to invest $10K than $100K and it’s often hard for a business to take such a big risk without being absolutely certain about what return on their investment they will be guaranteed.
Consider asking for a smaller sponsorship investment first, work hard to prove the return on investment and then return to that sponsor for more later.
This works really well with the 7 summits because you could speak to your sponsor for Elbrus or Kili, do a great job and then return to them with a bigger request for Aconcagua, Vinson, Everest once you have proved what you can offer works.
5. Think Outside of the Box
The most logical sponsors to approach are usually gear sponsors in the outdoor space. Yes they might be happy to throw you some free product but you might find you are getting lots of polite rejection. Remember these are also the brands that receive pitches for sponsorship daily for the same kind of pursuits and often have their own in-house athletes on the payroll, so you will be competing heavily for their attention.
Better to think outside the box.
What other industries or products could use a ‘mountain metaphor’ in their marketing? Perhaps insurance, financial services, legal, even medical technologies might be interesting brands to approach.
More importantly, what brands/products fit your personal brand, message and offering the best?
6. The First Sponsor is the Hardest
Getting the first sponsor is usually the hardest. Often it will require huge perseverance to land the first one. Keep going! You will learn the most from that process. With each ‘No’ try to get some feedback. What was the most compelling part of your pitch, the most valuable thing you were offering? Ask them what would have helped sway their decision. Use that feedback to improve and fine tune your pitch and your offering.
Once you have your first sponsor, other sponsors are likely to feel more comfortable jumping onboard if they can see that someone else sees the value in your project and that the return is worth the risk.
Keeping that in mind and what we said above about starting small – it’s often easier to ‘spread’ your funding budget and ask for a smaller investment first (which is always easier to land) and then use that momentum to approach other non-competitive and complimenting sponsors to join in the efforts, once you’ve got the first one.
This means you need to plan ahead and start your sponsorship drive well in advance of your goal to give you enough time to win multiple sponsors.
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We hope this helps! A friend of ours also put together this video on seeking sponsorship for mountaineering, and we think it has some valuable advice:
https://gearjunkie.com/how-to-get-sponsored-outdoor-sports-athlete?fbclid=IwAR2s3EKuog7oWR7QDzDWmW-iQ-pFi2haBh2sd87daLpmCef6xLkZ0rMz2Uw
While CTSS would love to help all the aspiring mountaineers that approach us for sponsorship or subsidized spots on our expeditions, CTSS is still a small, family run business and we aren’t yet in a position where we can help this way. Instead, we hope the above info is useful and we would be honoured to be part of your climbing logistics when your funding comes through and be part of your journey to achieve your climbing dreams.