Prospectus

Because sponsors matter.

One seemingly important part before reaching out to the sponsors is to create a so called document named "Prospectus." This document's purpose is to show your prospecting sponsors what they will get in return of sponsoring your amazing event, hence the name.

We will go into more detail for the entire sponsor finding process in Working with Sponsors section, but for now you should know that prospectus should be shown after you establish initial communications, and serve a few tasks:

• A quick explanation of what your event is

• When and Where your event is

• What will the sponsor get from this deal

• A quick money <> perks comparison without much detail

• A showcase of how professional you are

The prospectus should work as a gateway into an actual negotiation. It should provide enough info that someone in the company you are talking with can show it to someone else and they should get the general idea of what the deal is about, but it should incur them to be curious about the details [1]. Pro tip: Use cognitive communication principles outlined by Kosslyn et al. to make sure that your prospectus will have long-lasting impression on sponsors, which would make them more likely to be interested in your hackathon and reach back to you (such a great opportunity to apply #communicationdesign in real life scenarios!).

Providing way to few may lead them to suspect you don't know what you are doing, while providing too much like we did in the beginning makes the further negotiation harder for you.

Our 3 page prospectus [2]

While we were first making the prospectus, we put waaaaay too much information about pricing, with multiple tiers providing different benefits. This made the sponsors shy away from the big monetary contributions, and instead pushed them to get more stuff with the cheapest option. We also had too many pages, which was not the best.

In the best utopian scenario, you prospectus will work perfectly, and you will easily get all the money after your first email with it, however that is not what happened. See the next section about working with sponsors to get more ideas about how this process actually works :)

HC footnotes:

[1] #communicationdesign: For the creation of the prospectus, we used 8 cognitive communication principles by Kosslyn et al. For example, to make sure that sponsors can encode information provided by in the prospectus, we clearly separated paragraphs with bold and colored text for salience. Also, the text color and the background are clearly separable as well as key words are bolded to be easily distinguished and read by the reader (discriminability). There are no irrelevant information , and the document is concise. Elements are perceptually organized, and unfamiliar terms like 'hackathon' is defined.