If anyone out there is reading this, please comment, I get the feeling that I'm the only one reading this blog. If you have suggestions for additional topics or questions please post them, I may be able to help or someone else may have suggestions.

So now you have your Website, your target list of potential sponsors with their contact information and dreams of "free gear". A few additional items will lend more credibility to your adventure as a potential advertising or marketing source for your list of potential sponsors.

Brochures, cards and a poster display were very helpful to us in letting folks know what we were doing. They were helpful for the fundraising component of our adventure and they were helpful in letting the sponsors know we were serious, committed and professional.

Brochures
These have the potential of being somewhat expensive, however with a little creativity they will only cost you your time. We talked with a local designer - it was an owner-operator kind of business and the designer agreed to help us out with the brochure design in exchange for getting his logo on our website and on every brochure we handed out. He also just liked being involved in what we were doing, we were always enthusiastic and grateful. When people commented on the brochure (always positive comments) we gave credit where credit was due and plugged our designers business.

It is important that if you take this approach you have a clear idea up front of what you want and what materials you have available to you for the designer to work with. If you have already created a website you should share it with the designer so she can give the brochure the same look and feel. Ideally, you may want to approach the designer with the idea of working a bit on the website and the brochure. Designers typically spend a lot back and forth time with clients when the client and the designer don't exactly see eye-to-eye with the design. We were lucky and our designer gave us very close to what we wanted after 2 revisions. As a result there wasn't any frustration on the designers side in having to rework the creative.

Business Cards
The same discussion above holds true here. In our case went to Kinkos and printed business cards with a few words, our first name and our website. The cards were always given out to people after we explained what we were doing so it didn't need much. The goal was to get them to our website to stay in touch, learn about our sponsors and of course follow our adventure if they were interested.

Printing
Printing can be expensive especially if the print job is offset color. We opted for digital printing which was far less than offset and not too much of a compromise in quality. Our tri-fold brochures were on a single 8.5 / 11 sheet of paper, color and both sides. We found a printer in town that was willing to print several hundred of our brochures in exchange for advertising on the print shop on the back. The print shop was very supportive of the charitable organization that we were working for, this helped them to be open to the idea.

It is important when you talk with the designers and printers about helping out with your project that you have something to give back in return. Be honest about what you have to offer and enthusiastic and you will likely have some support. Another thing to keep in mind is to have some local or national media attention lined up so you can talk with your designer and printer about the kind of attention they may receive as a result of their pro bono work with you.

In the next section I'll talk about how to contact Newspapers, Radio and Television about your adventure.