Is Sponsorship For Your Next College Event Bothering You? Daddyspocket.com Might Have the Right Sponsor Waiting For You!

Shikha Abrol Aug 13, 2016

Raising sponsorship is a hard and tedious task, especially for college students. To give a solution to the struggles faced by event organizers in college in raising sponsorships, George Panamkuzha, Founder and CEO, Daddyspocket.com came up with a solution to this problem by aggregating sponsorship and providing the events with standard sponsorship packages to choose from. BW Disrupt got into an exclusive conversation with George to understand more on his start-up and their strategies:

Q1. What is your business model?

A- DaddysPocket follows an online task based approach for raising sponsorship and we charge a commission on the sponsorship value raised by the events. We create a pool of sponsorship money, which will be channeled to the events in the form of engagement oriented tasks.

An event organizer can raise this money by connecting with the sponsor and bringing in supporters to engage with the sponsoring brand. Money will be released from the sponsor’s wallet to the events on the completion of milestones. The more supporters an event can rally, the more money they can raise.

Q2. How is that you promote an event to get the right sponsors?

A- In a normal event sponsorship, the brand gets visibility among the event audience & attendees. We follow a “grassroots marketing” approach catering to specific target segments. Since our target segment is youth, we will aggregate those sponsors trying to reach out to them. Instead of promoting the event and driving visibility through it, we drive the brand using the event supporters by making them engage.

For students in a college, every event that they organize is a matter of their pride. So, by funding the events, the brand can create meaningful relationships with target consumers that can be leveraged to drive digital engagement metrics vital to fan acquisition, video distribution, content creation, app downloads and consumer insights initiatives.

Q3. What is your pricing policy?

A- Sponsors can activate sponsorship packages starting from INR 5,000 from their dashboard. Sponsors’ money is released to the event per task completed per user. Task pricing ranges from Rs.5 to Rs.30. We charge a 20 percent commission on the sponsorship value raised.

Q4. Your platform serves two audiences. If you are to share three major USP’s for them, what will they be?

A- For Events:

· Easy access to sponsors.

· Raise money in a few clicks.

· The event organizer can focus on the event quality rather than worrying about money.

For Sponsors:

· Targeted Youth Marketing

· Dedicated dashboard to set up sponsorship preferences

· Our system tracks all engagement data and provides detailed analytics unlike offline sponsorship.

Q5. Negotiations are a big part of your business. How do you handle them?

A- Since we strictly follow an online approach to sponsorship market, our pricing plans for the tasks are designed in such a way that the sponsors’ get value for the amount of money they are spending. By following such a standardized pricing package, we can ensure and measure deliverable from both the ends, which is absent in an offline event sponsorship. This will help us focus more on scaling and bring down negotiations.

Q6. Are there any typical filters that you have you have to narrow down connect between the right sponsor for the right event?

A- Yes. We do have such a filtering. The sponsor who is signing up can set-up his sponsorship objectives, engagement goals and target market demographics in the dashboard provided and based on this, we will be choosing events for the sponsor.

Every event organizer and supporter will be signed up through their Facebook/Google accounts. DaddysPocket then reads their social profile data and understands the users, thereby enabling us to rightly match the event supporters with the exact sponsor.

Q7. Sponsoring events is one of the strongest elements of a marketing mix of any brand, yet brands struggle to find relevant and meaningful opportunities. What is your take on the same?

A- For any sponsor, the event is just a channel to reach out to their target audience. Reaching out to the event audience is much more challenging than finding the right events. It is often seen that most of the visibility promised to the sponsor through the event is not delivered because the event could not scale enough to bring in enough footfalls. The sponsor has no means to track this data. Through DaddysPocket, even if the event gets scaled down, there is no compromise in the numbers and we truly provide experiential sponsorship marketing.

Q8. How did you come up with this name?

A- When it comes to the youth, when they are in need of money, they will approach their parents first. This related to our product and we had no second thoughts.

Q9. There might be a lot of Pros and Cons of this business. Can you share some with us?

A- Grassroots marketing implemented through sponsorship and digital marketing is a new concept for marketers in India. A new idea in an old market always has its pros and cons. Acceptability is a challenge. But since DaddysPocket enables a reach to more than 100 million college students in the country, marketers are ready to experiment and have already started loving us.

Q10. What is your advice to the young entrepreneurs?

A- Hope and persistence should drive you forward while starting up. Every big challenge you face will always be followed by a big positive change. Those changes will take you forward to succeed.