We have compiled a list of items for your organization to consider when building out your sponsorship program in REACH. Pre-determining your sponsorship program preferences as an organization for each of these items should greatly help to simplify your setup process. 

Note: Interested in trying out sponsorships to see if we’re the right fit? Refer to our Trying out Sponsorships article to learn how to add a few key records to help you determine if REACH is right for you.

Review this Sponsorships Checklist and then you can follow the 4 steps at the bottom to begin the setup process.

We hope you find this list helpful, regardless of whether you are creating a new sponsorship program or moving your current sponsorship program into REACH.

Notes: This checklist is for sponsorships. To set up your full REACH account, start in our Getting Starting section and be sure to use our Setup Checklist.

Click on the headings for more information.

Sponsorship Settings Options#

• What Account Rules do you want to set up?
• Do you want to set granular admin access?
• Do you want to customize your Sponsorships pages?
• Do you want to modify your communications? (Email Templates, Supporter Notifications, Mail Merge Templates, Automations)
• Do you want to label certain sponsorships with tags?

Sponsorship Custom Fields#

• What demographic and personal information (custom fields) do you want to capture per sponsorship? (ex: Grade, Favorite Activity, Favorite Color, Favorite Subject)
  • Note: You do not need to create a custom field for Age. For privacy concerns, the Birthdate field is automatically converted to Age and displayed.
• What custom fields do you want shown to Admins only? (ex: Vaccination status)
• What custom fields do you want shown to Sponsors only? (ex: Report Card)

Sponsorship Types#

• Shares: Do you want to break down the monthly cost of a sponsorship into shares to allow multiple supporters to sponsor? 
• Cost per Share: If you do break down the monthly cost, how much does each sponsorship share cost?
• Share Types: Do you want to further sub-divide your sponsorship shares into share types? (ex: Healthcare, Education, Nutrition)

Sponsorship Images#

• Do you have a sponsorship image per sponsorship? (preferred square size of 900px x 900px and under 3MB in size)
• If not, do you have a placeholder image ready for your sponsorships without a photo?
• Do you have multiple images per sponsorship?
• Do you want to put hide your sponsorships images?

Naming Sponsorships#

• When naming each sponsorship, consider the privacy concerns of the countries you are working in. Do you need to hide the sponsorship’s name from the public view?
  • Note: The sponsorship’s permalink used in REACH will be derived from the title.   
• Have you saved your sponsorship images to match the sponsorship’s title?
  • For example, if using the sponsorship’s name, the images file names should be firstname-lastname to help match the sponsorship’s photo with the sponsorship’s record in REACH.

Previous Sponsorship System#

• Do you want to include an External Reference ID from a previous system?
  • Note: This is a system included field available on imports, you do not need to create a Custom Field for this information. 

Classifying Sponsorships#

• Classify your sponsorships by Sponsorship Status, Sponsorship Visibility and Sponsorship Program Status.

Family Unit & Sponsorship Grouping#

• Do you want to link sponsorships into family units? (Link siblings and/or households?)
• Do you want to provide sponsors the ability to sponsor an entire family unit?
• Or, do for privacy concerns to you want to group sponsorships by Classroom or Age Range? (ex: Primary School Boy or Girl or 3rd Grade Classroom)

Filtering and Ordering Sponsorships#

• Will you want to mark certain sponsorships as Biggest Need?
• What filters do you want included when a potential sponsor searches for a sponsorship?
  • Note: Status, Type, Place, Age are included. Additional options are Biggest Need, Project, Month, Day, Gender, Categories, Grouping/Family Unit)
• Do you want to order your sponsorships by position, alphabetically or at random?
• Do you want to hide your fully sponsored sponsorships from public view?
• Do you want to remove the days waiting count from your sponsorship profiles?

Sponsorship Conversations#

• Do you want to allow moderated Conversations between your sponsorships and sponsors?
• Do you want to enable Video Messaging in Conversations among your sponsors and sponsorships?
• Do you want to include conversation attachments in the emails to your supporters?
• What rules and/or guidelines do you want to have in place for this?

Sponsorship Gifts#

• Do you want to provide the ability for sponsors to purchase and/or donate gifts for their sponsorships?

Online Sponsorships#

• For online sponsorships that become past due, do you want your sponsors to be able to log in to their donor portal and see a catch up sponsorship payment alert? This will alert your sponsors of their past due amount and once they click the button, they can quickly and easily catch up on their sponsorship payments by donating the past due amount.

Offline Sponsorships#

• For sponsorships that are paid offline (via cash or check), do you want to set up automatic emails to your supporters to thank them for sponsoring and to remind them of payment? View our Supporter Notifications article to learn more.

Setting up a sponsorship program in REACH takes four main steps#

1. Create any custom fields for your sponsorship program
2. Create the sponsorship types needed for your organization
3. Add or import your sponsorship profiles into REACH
4. Add or import your sponsorship images into REACH 

After the basic sponsorship information has been added, you can then: convert your sponsorships to online, start a sponsorship for a supporter, tag your sponsorships to assign them to an admin or an admin-only view priority status and/or enable admin-moderated conversations among your sponsors and their sponsorships.

Let’s begin by creating your custom fields for your Sponsorships.