Working with Sponsors

GPN sponsorship is an important part of how we support our national community and how we grow to new locations. It helps us pay for things that help our nodes grow like T-shirts, stickers, event advertising, tutor engagement events and the end of year celebration. It also allows us to fund travel between nodes which is essential whenever we help start a new node. 

We love our sponsors! We operate under a tiered sponsorship system, where different levels of sponsorship mean organisations receive different benefits, which are laid out in our sponsorship prospectus. 

Description

GPN sponsors give us money under agreement that gives them specific benefits, such as:

• Having their logo on banners, content, and promotional material

• Giving welcome speeches or after lunch speeches at workshops

• Distributing merch at events

• Mentoring slots in Mentor Hangz

• Hosting events for GPN tutors or students at their workplace

• Their logo on our GPN T-shirts

Our sponsors are an important part of our community that let us continue to do what we do! So we want to make sure they are happy in this relationship and we are giving them what we have promised. Much of this is accomplished by ensuring you:

• Display your GPN banner at events

• Ensure all GPN tutors are wearing a GPN T-shirt (note: if tutors already have a GPN shirt, they do not need to swap it for the latest one, they can continue to wear their old one. Event leads should be wearing the latest shirt though)

• If we pass on any merch to you to hand out, you pass it along to students and tutors.

• Making sure that all the volunteers and leaders at GPN are speaking positively about our sponsors at GPN events. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinions and viewpoints about these companies, but while they are representing GPN it’s important that they not say anything negative about our sponsor organisations.

Our obligation to ensure we provide enough speaking opportunities, mentoring slots, and organisation-hosted events is totalled at a national level, but that does mean that sometimes we will ask you to support us by having some of these done at your node. Generally, 

• If there is a tutor from a sponsoring organisation who requests to be a mentor in Mentor Hangz, allocate them there if you can. 

• We will let you know if we need you to make space in your day to do a welcome speech or after-talk speech, this should slot in easily to your existing slides and schedule. 

What prep/work is there

• Keep an eye out for sponsor tutors in the sign up and allocate them to roles as necessary

• Make sure you have the latest banners/T-shirts at each event

Getting new national sponsors

We get new sponsors in a variety of ways, including interested companies reaching out to us, our volunteers working in tech getting their employers interested, and seeking sponsorship from notable tech companies.

If there’s an opportunity for a discussion with a potential sponsor you can do these three things to help get them on the path to becoming a national GPN sponsor. 

1. Talking to them about your involvement in the program and why you like GPN is a great way to start to get a company interested in being involved. You can use the annual report to get the latest numbers on the impact of GPN.

2. Point them in the direction of the sponsorship prospectus - this document has the latest info about sponsoring GPN 

3. Connecting them with the GPN executive to have a meeting to discuss sponsorship opportunities