Can’t believe it’s soon Christmas

We’re still here – just a bit busy, and in the middle of everything the website shut down for a couple of days too. But now it’s up and running again and I’m back in blogging business.

The past few weeks have been a bit up-side-down and with Christmas coming up real soon (less than two weeks!!) there’s been a lot of other things to think about. But we’ve tried our best to continue planning for the trip on the side and are now, finally, ready to start contacting potential sponsors. We’ve spent months discussing what to ask of them, what we can offer them and how we should present the project, trying to figure out a more detailed budget, and now we finally have somewhat a plan. It’s nerve-wrecking, let me tell you, thinking about contacting sponsors. It’s really The Next Step out of our little dream bubble and into reality. This is it, this is what it all comes down to. Will we be able to make this trip or not?

And we could have had more time. We could have done things differently and been more efficient. It’s always easy to be wise when you look back on things but right now we’re a bit stressed and disappointed with ourselves. At first, we felt that we started quite well in advance with the trip planning – a year and a half before planned departure – but the months have passed so quickly. We thought we could start contacting sponsors after summer, when the car work was pretty much done, but then all the car inspections made it difficult to let go of that fully, and then we went on holidays for almost a month. And then we’ve both been busy working. And now it’s almost Christmas, which means most businesses shut down for the holidays and even if we start contacting people now, we won’t get much out of them until January anyway.

With less time it feels even more important to take advice and get help from people with more experience than us so that we can avoid some of the beginner’s mistakes and save some time that way. In January we will be seeing Nicklas Lautakoski again for some further advice on sponsorship and we really appreciate him taking the time to help us. We have already learnt a lot from the way he organised his funding, offering companies different sponsorship packages for example.

We’ve basically put together packages on different levels and in return for their financial support of the trip the main service from our side will be the marketing; putting the companies’ logos on the cruiser, our clothes and the website. This means we will market them in almost 30 countries on three continents during six months. So these main packages will first and foremost be offered to bigger, international companies that would really feel they gained something from that, but we will of course be interested in smaller companies supporting us as well. Every penny will be greatly appreciated. The marketing will be the main thing, but then we also offer a variety of reports, written and photographic material that they can use and inspirational speeches with slideshows after the trip for example.

At first it was difficult to know how much to ask for but doing some research we learnt, for example, that a company will pay around 300 000 SEK for a full page ad in Dagens Nyheter (biggest daily newspaper) – for one day. That gives you some perspective on the costs of marketing. We still haven’t asked for that much, but considering we can offer marketing in almost 30 countries on three continents during six months, I sure do hope the sponsors will see the win-win in it all and will be willing to support us.

So now we’ll just have to see if the sponsors will get on board our project in the first place, and then if we have any chance of getting any bigger sums of money, and how many sponsors we will be able to get. We obviously couldn’t say “we want one sponsor that gives us this much and three that gives us this much” and so on, It sounds so easy when you talk about it, but like I wrote earlier, we don’t have the best starting point, not having done anything like this before and just being ordinary, however adventurous, people.

When you’re stressed about something it always sucks being forced to wait. But we realized we might as well wait until the beginning of January before starting to contact the bigger companies since they probably will be too busy these last few days before the holidays. So now we just need to try and chill and enjoy the holidays and recharge our batteries and then get this project rolling first thing next year!

Max - December 16, 2011 - 9:17 am

Don’t wait! Start sending out requests/teasers now, maybe in the form of christmas cards? Then remind the same people in january! Just as you are, most companies nail their budget in december… And it is sometimes hard to get the information to reach the right person. By sending out touren proposal multiple times, you increase your chances!

Anna - December 19, 2011 - 3:24 pm

Yeah we were thinking about doing just that, starting to contact people and then get back to them again in January – but we’ve just been too busy! Will just have to hope we still have fair chances starting at the beginning of the year. Thanks for the advice though. :)

lin barrie - December 21, 2011 - 11:46 am

Good Luck Anna and Brian, are you going to come via Zimbabwe to Mozambique?

Anna - December 22, 2011 - 3:39 pm

Hi Lin, great to see you visit our blog! Yes, we’re planning on doing Zimbabwe on the way but haven’t entirely decided what parts of the country to visit yet, or if we’ll go all around it. :)

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