Success of the Week: Gaining Sponsorship!

Through experience I have found that when it comes to soliciting sponsorship or donations, there are two types of people in the workplace: those who are comfortable with it, and those who are not. I would place myself in the latter category. If you would place yourself in this category as well, despite your greatest efforts to avoid it, somewhere along the line your career might require this ability. So how do you overcome it? Just do it!
Coming into this internship I had had some experience with soliciting sponsors for a previous company I worked for. Unfortunately I still felt like it was a weak area in my abilities and I set a goal to improve this skill by the end of the internship.  Telling myself that I had to go through it at some point, I asked my fellow intern Meg if there was anything I could do to help her, since she was taking charge of sponsorship for our upcoming Career Week. She openly accepted my offer and we set out to get our sponsors with the help of our senior intern Stephanie.
After some brainstorming of local area businesses and organizations that we could approach, we just went for it. I was extremely nervous at first, because I had no idea how to ask a company for sponsorship. I told myself to simply be open, honest and professional and with the help of the other interns we started to get really positive responses. I started feeling pretty good about what we were doing, and after a few first attempts we began to truly learn the best ways to approach people, what worked and what didn’t. However cliché it may sound, I definitely learned that by simply encouraging myself to go out and try it, I became much more confident in my ability to approach other business professionals, and we gained some great sponsorships and donations along the way!