How to find
sponsors for
your community

Sponsorship isn't just for big sports clubs

When people think "community sponsorship," they think running or fitness first. Makes sense, it's the most visible territory. But brands aren't necessarily chasing a specific activity type, they're mostly looking for a group of people who trust each other and meet up in person, regularly. A book club of 25 members meeting monthly can be just as valuable, to the right brand, as a run club of 40 runners.

A founders' club, a wine club, a recurring hackathon, a Sunday hiking group: that's an engaged audience, and hard to fake. Nobody shows up on a Sunday morning for a group they don't actually care about.

What brands actually want

Before pitching anyone, it helps to understand what you have to offer. In practice, a brand is usually looking for some combination of:

• Access to a qualified audience — their presence at your events, a mention inside your community.
• Authentic content — photos, stories, and reviews from real members who use the product.
• An activation ground — a place and moment to test a product or service in real conditions.
• Social proof — the fact that your community chooses the brand, publicly, without it sounding like an ad.

It's not necessarily your size that matters most, it's how regular and engaged the group is.

Direct outreach works. It's just slow.

Emailing brands one by one can work, and plenty of organisers do fine that way. The real problem is the time it takes: finding the right contacts, guessing who has budget available, following up, getting a lot of silence before the first reply. Over time, it's tiring, especially when you're running your community on top of a full-time job.

The other problem is timing. A brand doesn't run a sponsorship campaign year-round: it has budget available at a specific moment, for a specific project. Pitch it six months too early and it has nothing to offer you. Pitch it six months too late and the budget's already gone to someone else. That's what makes direct outreach so hit-or-miss: it works, but mostly on lucky timing.

Every community has its market

The same logic applies to plenty of community types that meet in real life:

• Book club, reading circle — publishers, stationery brands, cafés, tea brands.
• Supper club, tasting club — food brands, drinks, kitchenware.
• Cycling club, hiking group — outdoor gear, sports nutrition, technical brands.
• Founders' club, professional community — SaaS tools, banks, coworking spaces.
• Wine club, spirits tasting club — cellars, spirits brands, accessories.

If your community meets regularly around a shared interest, there's a good chance a brand is already looking for that kind of ground.

How Kithe fits in

Kithe is a community sponsorship platform: you list your community once, for free, and your profile stays visible to the brands that match you, on an ongoing basis. No more relying on lucky timing: the day a brand decides to launch something, you're already one of the communities it's looking at, instead of being missed because your message landed too early or too late.

• Free for organisers.
• Every approach goes through you: you say yes, no, or not now.
• Product, a cash grant, or member perks — you pick what fits.

Frequently asked questions