MaxPreps, a CBS Sports company, recognizes one male and one female athlete every month as part of their High School Athlete of the Month program. They honor an athlete from a different sport in a different location for great achievements on and off the field. How do they find professional athletes each and every month to help them with this ongoing project to inspire young athletes? Yep, you guessed it. Using www.OpenSponsorship.com!
Every month, MaxPreps creates a Campaign on OpenSponsorship for each event, which takes about 10 minutes to fill out on our website. They include the time, date, deliverables needed from the athlete, and even the budget they are willing to pay all in their Campaign. This assures that every athlete who applies is extremely interested in accepting this offer and then it is up to the brand to decide on which athlete to work with, already knowing they have interest from each athlete. You can see an example Campaign below for their upcoming event in May.
During the past two months, MaxPreps was looking to honor a male basketball athlete and a female softball athlete. They created campaigns, like the one you see above, and ended up working with NBA star Perry Ellis & USA Softball star Kelsey Stewart.
Matt Goudreau, Director of Integrated Marketing at CBS Interactive, said “"Creating my first campaign via OpenSponsorship's platform was not only easy and seamless but provided us here at CBS Sports/MaxPreps great talent options for our High School Athlete of the Month campaign. We received quick responses & strong candidates to choose from, that met all our criteria. Kelsey Stewart was selected and helped honor one of our award winners. She met and exceeded our expectations by being well spoken, professional and aligned perfectly with what we were looking for to help represent our brand. She even wore her US National team jersey to provide more excitement for the kids she engaged with, and all around was great to work with."
We also asked Matt about his interaction with Perry Ellis and he had nothing but positive things to say about the experience, “"Perry Ellis was a great fit with our High School Athlete of the Month Program. His story of perseverance and success aligned well with the student-athlete we here at MaxPreps were honoring. He was well spoken and professional, and again exceeded our expectations once again showcasing how great the OpenSponsorship platform has been for CBS Sports/MaxPreps in the short time we've been utilizing it. All-around a great success."
Our 2,000+ professional athletes are always on the lookout for the next best brand to promote and - contrary to misguided popular belief - they don’t always ask for a monumental fee. Both Perry and Kelsey were so happy to take part in these campaigns and MaxPreps was so happy with the results! You can see the social media posts below by each athlete.
Kelsey also had some awesome things to say about this project and CBS Interactive plans to use her positive feedback moving forward for future events. Kelsey was quoted saying, “MaxPreps provided an amazing opportunity for younger athletes who excel not just in their respected sport but outside of that as well. I learned to balance community service, school, and softball whenever I was in college. So for them to be recognizing this at an earlier stage is something I applaud.”
With more than 2,000 professional athletes available for your company to partner with on our site, across 40 different sports, we’d be excited to help you find the perfect sports star to increase the performance your next marketing campaign and help you make some waves of your own.
Want to get in on the sports sponsorship fun? I’ll give you the steps to #MakeSponsorshipSimple!
