Need Help Funding a Sports Leadership Program for Your Team? We’ve Got Some Tips.
Some insight for leveraging philanthropy and funding a sports leadership program (or even a simple, affordable tool like our DAL360) for your team or school, including a template email to potential donors.
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At DAL we work hard to make sure our leadership development tools are affordable and accessible. Affordable pricing means that even if you can’t find funds in your current budget, you can and should be able to make a modest request for funding from alumni, corporate partners, or other donors.
Many are excited to support leadership development, especially when they hear how much bang they’re getting for their buck.
Fundraising for modestly-priced, high-impact leadership development can also be a great way to engage new donors who will remain invested and committed to your team’s success.
We know that fundraising can seem daunting, so in an effort to make it easier for our coaches, here are a few of the best talking points for conveying the value of DAL’s leadership development tools to potential donors.
At the end, we also provide a template email to make it easier for you to reach out to donors and secure funding for our (or any other) leadership development tools.
We are here to support you every step of the way and to make your own investment in leadership development as easy and useful as possible.
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Fundraising Talking Points
Broadly speaking, donors like to give to tangible things which they believe will yield a direct benefit to the student-athlete, the team, or the school.
In addition, any philanthropic effort that can connect donors directly with student-athletes is a great opportunity to build momentum in your relationship with them, and can lead to sustained engagement.
The benefit to DAL’s tool specifically is that outcomes can be measured; you can demonstrate that the investment a donor has made in your student-athletes is actually making a difference.
When speaking with donors about the opportunity and need to support your leader development efforts, the following can be helpful:
- Teaching athlete leadership with research-validated tools yields a sustainable competitive advantage. Better leaders position you to win more!
- Leadership can be developed like any other athletic skill, which makes a return on investment easy to justify: anyone can improve with practice and the right information.
- Moreover, sports are an ideal “learning laboratory” where athletes can test and hone transferable leadership skills, leading to greater success in life after their sports careers have ended.
- A disproportionate number of C-Suite executives were former athletes; leadership skills honed today will yield a benefit for decades to come.
- Understanding which skills to practice and improve upon is crucial to leadership development. An athlete leadership 360 Feedback Survey takes athletes through a process where teammates evaluate each other’s leadership skills and behaviors and then compare this feedback to their self-assessments.
- The goal of this feedback is to provide athletes with a comprehensive understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. When receiving comprehensive feedback from many perspectives, athletes can trust the truth of the results and gain better insight into their own performance.
- 360 Feedback is vital to a team’s performance because it allows athletes to identify blind spots and areas for development, which can ultimately improve their ability to lead and motivate their team. It also promotes self-awareness. By helping athletes understand how their actions affect others, a 360 Feedback Survey develops better communication, collaboration, and overall team functioning.
- Beyond sports teams’ performance, DAL’s athlete leadership 360 Feedback is an opportunity to give your athletes a chance to develop skills valuable in their lives and careers post-athletics.
These talking points should help you craft a value proposition and return-on-investment justification to your prospective donor.
And, below, we’ve crafted a template email to make fundraising even smoother for you. Feel free to copy, paste, and customize as you like.
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Template Email for Fundraising
You will need to determine whom to approach with fundraising solicitations like these.
Who would be excited if you developed stronger leaders on your team? Who would benefit? It’s worth considering alumni, parents, fans, and even corporate partners.
If your school has a fundraising team, they may have additional insights for you and be able to help you be more targeted in your outreach.
In addition, it’s important to understand that “cold emails” often do not yield gifts – but if prefaced (or followed up) by personal outreach, you may find them more effective.
Successful fundraising is predicated upon a relationship with donors – so we recommend starting with folks you may know well.
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Sample Fundraising Email to Alumni:
Dear [Name],
We are looking to invest in leadership development programming for our student-athletes here at [school], and seek your help.
We’re currently working with an innovative company, Developing Athlete Leaders (DAL), to bring leadership development tools to [all our student-athletes / our X team / etc.].
Specifically, our goal is to raise [$X] so that our student-athletes can have unlimited, immediate access to DAL’s leadership development resources, including a 360-degree Feedback Survey that spurs invaluable growth of athlete leaders.
As you know, we want to offer our student-athletes the best possible experience and gain any competitive advantage we can for our sports teams, but we always have an eye towards setting up our student-athletes for success post-athletics.
We believe that athlete leadership can be a sustainable competitive advantage in-season but also that our sports teams are an ideal “learning laboratory” where student-athletes can test and grow leadership skills transferable to life after graduation.
We aspire to offer 360-degree Feedback to our student-athletes annually, to be able to measure our leaders’ growth and tailor our leadership programming to the needs of our athletes. We also want to be able to measure outcomes, and be able to help our student-athletes to reflect on their own development.
You can read more about DAL’s 360 leadership skills tool here and here.
If you would like to help to make this vision a reality, please consider a gift of any amount toward our overall goal of raising $_____. Gifts can be made here: [payment link, directions, etc.].
Thank you for considering a gift in support of student-athletes at [school]. We look forward to partnering with you to make these 360 leadership tools immediately available to our [sport / team / athletes]. If you have any questions, please contact me at the email below.
Go, [Mascot],
[ your name ]
We hope you found this post useful. Please share your fundraising success stories in the comments below or by contacting DAL directly.
If you need additional help in speaking to your donors, please let us know – we’re always here.
Additionally, one of our partners, PowerAd, offers “Professional Booster Club Services” to augment your fundraising efforts. Though oftentimes booster clubs will focus on new scoreboards or field improvements, this approach can also help you obtain funding for leadership development programming.
