Hayley Daniels

Blog 1:

Marketing has become a passion where I get excited about campaigns, sponsorship and communications. My first passion is paddling and when I started to really get into my sport at a higher level the bank of Mom and Dad started to dry out (as I was getting older and needed to be self sufficient). The need to seek financial support indpendantly became a priority so that I could compete at an International level in Canoe Slalom.

After a quick google search “athlete sponsorship”, a broad spectrum of ten step guidelines and professional deals popped up, but nothing that really related to an amateur athlete level who had not been to the Olympics or won a medal yet. This is where I started conducting some research to see what other athletes in different sports were doing. After analysis I noticed that many of them had a website, a presence on social media (this didn't mean having a million followers) and some sort of way they were engaging with their sponsors.

This is when I decided to build my own website. A friend of mine showed me this new platform called [Squarespace](https://www.squarespace.com/ "Squarespace") where you could basically build your own website without having any coding knowledge, it was essentially like building another Facebook page where the finished product was a polished website. Now there are many platforms out there such as: Wix and Medalist .

This led me to questioning what do I put on this website?

So, I decided to gather some experiential knowledge and ask some professionals in the industry. After Googling “marketing agencies in Calgary” I started cold calling as many as I could, sending a message to their general email to explain my story and see if they would help me out. One agency got back to me, QED Marketing where a women reached out and agreed to meet for coffee, little did I know that she would become a great mentor and friend of mine. She provided me with some extremely valuable incite about branding, event planning and demographics. Not to mention she was a pretty inspiring person to look up to.

Many of the coffee meetings I had were not all cold calls where I had some connections that I made while volunteering for the Mount Royal University Marketing Society. There were two meetings that had a significant impact on me as an athlete and marketer with: Ernest Barbaric and Russell Reimer.

Ernest is an expert in branding. When we met in a cafe called Higher Ground he pulled out a blank piece of paper. In the middle he wrote “Haley” with a circle around it. He then started asking me questions like: tell me about your sport? Where are you from? What type of diet do you eat? What makes you unique as an athlete or your sport? Do you have any funky side hobbies? By the end of this we had a web of ideas, where we needed to narrow it down to three. These pillars ended up being: healthy living (at the time I was a vegan athlete, now I eat fish), gender equality (our sport at the time only had men in the Olympics) and local (born and raised in the Calgary, Alberta and the surrounding mountains). Ernest changed my way of communicating and thinking. After he broke it down into three bite sized pieces it was easy to look at my daily athlete lifestyle and how I could make intentional moves to represent those three branding areas.

I then was introduced to Russell who was a keynote speakers on athlete branding at the AthletesCan annual athlete representatives forum. He owns and manages a company called Manifesto Sport Management that represents many sport personalities in Canada from Tessa and Scott to Mark McMorris to Erica Wiebe. He did the same thing as Ernest (minus drawing a web) where he narrowed it down to one branding piece: women. He said focus your branding and communications on women empowerment, inclusion and the evolution of a movement “the future is female”. He made it clear to me. Don't make this a feminist argument, make it all inclusive. Tell a story about the barriers in your sport and how everyone both men and women can help to share your story. Again, Russel drastically changed my perspective as to how to represent my athlete brand.

It was then time to apply this information to my website. At this point I did not have any sponsors, but I had a lot more knowledge in regard to alignment with potential partners. I reached out to a hemp company called Manitoba Harvest and they accepted my sponsorship request for an exchange of social media content for free product. Woohoo!!

Now that I was successful I knew that I could attract bigger sponsors. On a spring day I was driving to training in Kananaskis Country where I noticed some very colorful paddles on the 1A Highway heading out of the city. It lead me to find out why they were there and who owned them because my sport is paddling and they used paddles for their advertising.

It turned out they were installed by a new lake lifestyle community called Harmony . I did some research and found out this community was being developed by a pair of Calgary companies, Bordeaux Developments and Qualico Communities . A good friend of mine, Thomas Cherney worked for Qualico at that time (he now owns his own social media company Social Stoke).

So I asked for a warm introduction. It all happened very quickly where I got a meeting with the leadership at Harmony. I prepared a small tailored portfolio (attached need to make a hyperlink) that laid out why it would be valuable to work together. The meeting went extremely well and they gave me a verbal offer and this lead to becoming apart of the amazing Harmony community.

We came up with different ways to leverage our partnership such as a media release and a campaign video that was filmed by a good friend of mine Danny Gariepy. Harmony was so impressed with the partnership they wrote an article: The Brand Strategy Behind Sponsoring an Athlete in a Digital World about our engagement together and the release of our successful Haley and Harmony video.

To wrap up these branding and sponsorship anecdotes amateur athlete sponsorship does not have a manual, but there are some foundational steps you can take to find sponsors.

Am I an expert in the field? No.

Will this process work for you? Who knows.

The thing I do know is if you stay true to your values I am sure potential sponsors will see your authenticity and want to work with you. So you might be thinking “sweet all I have to do is build a website, build a brand and get a meeting” sure, but if you want to really wow this potential partner, well that is so much more than I can fit into this short blog post. Don’t worry this is not a one off post, I will be writing two more apart of a series while being a #GamePlanChampion through @GamePlan.

Please comment below or DM me if you desire more incite or have feedback.