Here’s How To Get Banks To Sponsor You
First things first, it’s probably a good idea to set some expectations. Following the advice in this article does not automatically guarantee you will land a whale of a cash sponsorship with a bank.
What you will get though is some really valuable insights you can use to greatly improve your approach to a bank.
In reality, banks are relatively similar in their operations and services they offer. There really isn’t a lot of difference in what they provide which means you can save yourself a bunch of time by using a similar approach to all of them.
You might be reading this thinking ‘Hey! What makes you qualified to give these insights?’. Great question! I actually used to manage a multi-million dollar sponsorship portfolio for a bank so I’ll be drawing on my experience from then as well as my years of experience in the Sponsorship Industry.
Let’s jump into how to get a bank to sponsor you:
1. Understanding How A Bank Makes Money
If you want to offer value, it helps to know where a bank’s revenue comes from. Yes, you could try appealing to their desire to be a “good corporate citizen,” but a pitch that aligns with their financial goals is far more effective — especially when they have to justify spend to stakeholders.
Here’s how banks typically generate income:
- Lending: Home loans, business loans, infrastructure projects, and more
- Business, Rural, Commercial & Private Banking: Services tailored to different customer groups.
- Personal & Student Banking: Everyday accounts, student support.
- Insurance & Wealth: Coverage and investment products.
- Funds Under Management: From term deposits to retirement schemes (e.g. 401k, Superannuation).
- Credit Cards: Issued in partnership with Visa, Mastercard, AmEx — a major revenue source.
- Payments & FX: Transaction processing and foreign exchange.
Understanding this helps you frame your proposal in a way that ties back to their core business goals.
2. Insider Insights
In this part, I’m going to share with you some insights which you probably won’t find through research. In fact, probably some people who work at banks won’t even know this info.
The goal is to arm you with some useful insights to help you have better conversations when approaching banks for sponsorships.
Insight 1: Banks have multiple businesses
The best way I tell people to think about a bank is to view it as one large umbrella brand, with multiple smaller businesses that operate within it.
The reason I say this is because banks are typically pretty large. For instance, there were over 5,000 people who worked at the bank I did. There were 130 people in my wider team alone. That’s bigger than most small/medium businesses.
When you’re working with such large teams, it’s only natural that individual teams will often operate in silos or seemingly independent of one another.
Therefore, I tell people to think of every product or service, as well as all of the functions within the bank, such as Human Resources, Sales, Legal, I.T. etc, as their own small business.
Each department (or business) has a Head of Department or General Manager. Each of those Heads of Departments or General Managers has their own budgets as well as their own goals and objectives for their particular part of the business.
The reason this is important is because it means there’s often plenty of other people you can approach for sponsorship other than just the Marketing Team.
If you have benefits which might be of use to a particular team, then it gives you a reason to talk to them about it. For example, you could pitch volunteer opportunities to the Head of HR for staff engagement and professional development. You could pitch VIP hosting packages to the Head of Premium Banking as retention efforts for their high-net-worth clients.
Insight 2: Credit cards have BIG budgets
A fun fact about the banking world is that the team who manage credit card operations for the bank typically have a rather larger budget than most other teams.
If you’ve ever looked at your bank issued credit card, you’ll notice it will typically display a third-party logo on it, such as Visa or Mastercard.
Credit cards like these, which are issued by the banks, aren’t actually owned by the banks. The credit facility is owned by Visa or Mastercard, who pay a whopping amount of money to the banks to manage and issue the cards on their behalf.
Put it this way, the bank’s credit card team may have as big a budget as the rest of the bank’s entire marketing team combined. If you consider there were 130 people in the marketing team when I worked at a bank, that’s a pretty significant budget.
If you can pitch concepts such as exclusive payment options for Visa/Mastercard, early access to tickets for card holders, special entry, special bars, special parking, exclusive areas to access, money can’t buy experiences or something much more creative, then you’ll likely position yourself better for a conversation around sponsorship aligned with a bank’s credit card.
Insight 3: Banks care about financial literacy
Financial literacy is important to most banks. It’s important, because when people understand money, finances and are educated in this space, then they’re likely to earn more, and use more bank products/services.
In short, do you have benefits which lend themselves to financial literacy?
Here are some ideas which might be useful:
– Content series which focuses on budgeting, or shows behind the scenes of your charity, event, team’s financial planning for a big event. Show how it’s a constant juggle, and think of how you could showcase the bank’s experts to guide you along the way, while filming the whole thing.
– Money-saving tips and tricks. For instance, I recently pitched a concept to an investment firm in regards to a food and wine festival sponsorship. The concept involved filming a celebrity chef, showing how they find high quality food at cheaper prices, how they could make incredible meals out of leftovers or off-cuts and how you could do more for less. The investment firm could then use this content to help educate their customers around how to be better with money.
– Rewards, incentives or benefits which encourage some aspect of educating people about money. I once ran an activation called ‘Run Down Your Rate‘ which turned people’s marathon times into home loan rates and encouraged people to learn about interest rates/mortgages.https://app.kartra.com/external_video/youtube/FTbfDYkJmeI
ASB Run Down Your Rate Activation
Insight 4: Correct contact details
When I worked for a bank, they had a business objective of having at least 50% of their entire business completed digitally, e.g. transactions, new accounts, mortgage applications and so forth. This number is most likely higher by now.
One of the major barriers to achieving that goal was having the correct contact details on hand for their customers.
You see, people lose their phones, they change their address, get new email addresses and sometimes they change their names through marriage.
The bank knew that a customer with the correct contact details on file was worth more to the bank than a customer with incorrect details. With the correct details, the bank was able to send timely marketing messages, provide better customer service and, overall, they could ensure the customer had the right product or services for their needs.
Are there ways you can incentivise people to update their contact details?
Maybe you could provide exclusive access to an area at an event in exchange for updating your contact details with the bank.
Perhaps you could run a draw where anyone who updates their contact details during a particular month goes into the draw to win a money can’t buy experience. Or maybe you’ll plant a tree on their behalf, if you’re a charity.
Insight 5: Competitive advantage
As I mentioned earlier, banks don’t really differ much when it comes to the products and services they offer. They’re all pretty similar. It’s this competitive landscape that makes ‘competitive advantage’ benefits much more attractive and of greater value.
Competitive advantage benefits are benefits that can provide the bank and/or their customers with something which the other banks simply can’t provide.
This could be by way of money can’t buy experiences, customer-related benefits, exclusivity and other unique benefits.
Personally, I’ve witnessed on a number of occasions senior managers at the bank fight for a particular sponsorship or cause simply because they didn’t want another bank to have it out of fear the other bank could get some form of competitive advantage.
Most of the time though, these decisions weren’t really about sound sponsorship strategy, and typically had more to do with ego.
Insight 6: Venue sponsorships and banks
One of the most profitable services the bank offers is lending, where they loan you money and charge interest until you repay the loan.
For venues, I see this as one of the biggest draw cards you have when it comes to sponsorship.
Many venue builds or capital projects require millions of dollars in investment, infrastructure and building costs.
The majority of large capital projects undertake large loans in order to get off the ground.
To me, proposing your lending requirements to a bank in return for sponsorship seems like a fantastic benefit to offer.
3. Recap
Now you should be equipped with some useful insights to get the creative juices flowing when it comes to bank sponsorships.
After reviewing hundreds of sponsorship proposals when I worked at the bank, I can guarantee this, even if you just start thinking about sponsorship in a way which uses insights such as the ones outlined in this article, then you’ll easily be better than 99% of the other proposals the bank receives.
If you find this useful, make sure to let me know, or share it with others.
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