Far too many prospective sponsors fail before they contact anyone.
The optimum way to obtain a sponsor is to get your sponsor proposition and sponsorship deck right before you approach anyone. This is not easy; preparatory work can often take a number of weeks.
The British Photography Awards approached BDS for their help in procuring sponsorship for an awards ceremony. The BDS advice was that an award ceremony by itself wasn’t worth the amount the BPA was seeking. However, we believed that reshaping the offer could achieve the sponsorship monies they were seeking, or indeed a greater amount.
Working very closely with the BPA, BDS then created a comprehensive and customised sponsorship deck that secured the mobile giant Samsung, the only prospective sponsor that was approached.
The deck was totally tailored to Samsung; it combined not just reach (numbers and data) and charity involvement, but also activation proposals totally aligned with Samsung’s latest products at the time.
Now the reworked sponsorship proposal not only offered year-round engagement but also briefly illustrated how it could be expanded into a global sponsorship property.
The main goal of the sponsorship deck was to be hyperpersonalised for Samsung. However, through its development, BDS also created a template that would be easily customisable and suitable for other sponsors. Some elements of the deck – such as the content marketing concepts – were purely aimed at Samsung, but the flexibility and versatility of the rest of the deck made it a model for other sponsorship approaches.
For more on how BDS can help identify and implement sponsorship strategies for your organisation, get in touch with us today.
Last Updated on February 26, 2026
