Sponsership; How to ask for money from strangers?

Reverend_Chaos

I am part of a Historical European Martial Arts club that is run as a study group training in German Longsword fighthing. This is pretty big in Europe, and is starting to pick up steam here in the U.S. but is largely unknown. Most of our group has been doing this for 2-3 years. As a study group we all pitch in $30 a month in "dues" that we use for group purchases (5-6 paying members on average). We have tossed around the idea of requesting sponsorship but no one in our group has ever done that before, and I was hoping to get some pointers.

I don't expect anything huge from this, but every little bit could help at this point. There are several tournaments hosted in the U.S. on the East Coast mostly, and many more in Europe. We cannot currently afford to go to these, and that is one thing we are hoping sponsorship could help with...

Some ideas of what we might be looking for
Equipment - Shoes, shirts and pants would be the only generic thing, everything else is very specific, like fencing masks, fencing jackets, etc.
Promotional Items - business cards, Stickers, Patches etc.
Cash - used for equipment or for travel costs to attend events

Lastly, who do we ask? We could just send out a ton of letters, but I am thinking of being a little more specific and personalized.

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

Wherever you get your gear would be the obvious place to start (Longsword Supply? I dunno.) The basic pitch is "you comp us some gear or sharpenings (or whatever it is that you get from them), and in return we market you when we go to events and things of that nature."

You need to decide in advance what you're asking for (easy enough if you are asking for in-kind benefits) and what you're willing to do: have signs up? Wear logos on your stuff? Distribute marketing materials? Etc.

Then just walk in or call, ask to talk to somebody about sponsorship, and say "our club is looking for sponsors to do some more traveling to events and tournaments, and we were wondering if you would be willing to provide X. In exchange we'll display your materials prominently, have a big sign up, and wear Dave's Sword Supply Co. patches on the right shoulder of our whatever-it-is-you-wear."

Pure Din

I don't mean to discourage you, but with only 5-6 people the effort might be better spent trying to grow the size of your club so the costs can be spread among more people. My bf also does the medieval swords thing and they do a lot of one day workshops to raise some money and recruit new people, and they go do demonstrations at fairs and stuff too; but no sponsors as far as I know.

Ruckus

Maybe you can get all your members to start buying their hand wraps, icy-hot, cold packs, tensor bandages, petroleum jelly, et cetera from the same medical/athletic supply store, and try and get sponsorship from them.