You see it at nearly every sporting or entertainment event you attend – corporate sponsorships are everywhere and for good reason. They work – generating significant dollars for organizations that are aware that businesses tend to have money set aside for community marketing efforts.
Sponsorships are also an effective way for newspapers to generate revenue they need to get things done like digitizing and making their historic archives online accessible and searchable. Sponsorships work because historical preservation projects, like sporting events, are things people, and more importantly businesses, want to be a part of – people want to participate so engage them.
Think it won’t work? Just see how it’s working for other newspapers across the country.
- The Mooreland Leader in northwest Oklahoma let the community know it was looking for sponsors to help put its archive online and almost immediately had a new revenue stream as local businesses and even individuals wrote checks to help. Today, the archive is up and accessible at mor.stparchive.com. You can see sponsors recognized on the archive page.
- The Jewish News of Tidewater in Virginia put out a call to the community that it was hoping to digitize its archives and, like The Mooreland Leader, people just started sending in money. Today, the archive scanning is almost complete. Read more here.
- Arkansas Catholic, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Little Rock (AR), launched a successful “Guardian Angels” campaign in 2010 to fund the digitization of its archive dating back to 1911. See their campaign webpage at:
http://www.arkansas-catholic.org/contact/donate.
Discover America’s Story helps provide sponsorship materials to newspapers wanting to go that route to pay for scanning their bound volume or loose printed archives. Just contact us to find out how you can get free resources and begin securing your local sponsors today.
