By Adam Wakefield
“Picture yourself as a large, national or multinational business with satellite offices, different regions, different nuances per a province, and think about how many sponsorship proposals they receive daily, annually. It really is quite busy and disruptive to them,” founder
Matthew Fendick told media at the platform’s launch in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 1 March.
“How much easier is it to have a centralised platform where all of these proposals are received, they’re captured, there’s an instantaneous recommendation to the corporate, there’s a response to the rights owner or the sponsorship seeker? This is done automatically?”
Fendick says in the sponsorship space, there are a few degrees of separation between the right conversation, the right partner, and the right opportunity, with there being a real need to connect the dots between sponsors and the yet-to-be sponsored at a faster rate than currently happens.
“There’s a real need for businesses to do a bit of dating before they get married and I think that’s really relevant for modern day life, as much as sponsorships,” Fendick said. “That’s really something we are trying to solve here. Brands really need an option and a channel to be able to make an informed, uninfluenced decision on their sponsorship portfolio.”
sponsorshop is based on a match-making principle, the “Tinder of sponsorships” as once described to Fendick and a term which he uses quite regularly.
“Our focus is marrying mutual objectives based on the information that registered users provide in their profile. It’s that simple,” he says. “Users can register on the site. It’s a free platform to engage on, you complete a profile and within that you add the opportunity or opportunities that you are seeking sponsorship for, or alternatively, that you are looking to sponsor.”
sponsorshop’s automated system will notify both the party seeking sponsorship, as well as potential sponsors, of what’s available on the platform, facilitated by its monitoring and tracking system.
“If you were to be connected around a potential opportunity, we’d have sight of that to ensure we aren’t cut out of the loop in any successful sponsorship transactions that are facilitated through the platform,” Fendick says.
What sponsorshop receives from successfully linking up sponsors and those seeking sponsorship is a flat 5% fee, with other services offered, depending on the needs of the parties involved.
In the next three to five years, Fendick aims for sponsorshop to be the standard platform for the sponsorship industry in South Africa, connecting and facilitating connections and sponsorship transactions.
Further, as the platform grows, the filters will function in such a way so that sponsors are able to interact with the potential opportunities they wanted to interact with, instead of having to trawl through large quantities of sponsorship opportunities.
“I fundamentally believe we are going to open up sections of corporate South Africa that didn’t know they could be sponsors,” Fendick said.
sponsorshop are also looking into possible crowd-funding sponsorships in the local market place, and developing a Dragon Den-style event based on sponsorship.
Those already working with Fendick are the likes of Gauteng Opera, represented at the launch by CEO CEO
Marcus Desando, and leading IRONMAN athlete
Parys Edwards.
Edwards told the room she spends a lot of time seeking sponsorship but, more often than not, gets nothing back for her efforts.
“It almost seems like for people like me pot luck. I still have to work part time. I train full time, I work part time and I spend every single waking minute around the admin of race negotiations and sponsors and it’s absolutely exhausting,” Edwards said. “You are reliant on luck so often or a connection and that’s why this is such a great idea.”
sponsorshop is the first digital foray into a field with its own idiosyncrasies within the local marketplace. It will be intriguing to watch it's potential growth over time, and whether sponsorshop becomes the game changer Fendick firmly believes it can be.