English Chess Forum

Yes I know your all thinking, hes gone completely mad because why on earth would anyone sponsor an amateur chess club!

But seriously is it realistically possible for a local chess club to get sponsorship from a local business/company! Have there been any success stories.

Like all chess clubs we need money, mainly to pay the rent, overall we are in a sound financial position, but if we could we would probably look into replacing the existing clocks we have with some digital chess clocks.

(And yes I hate to bring the subject of money up on the forum.)

Sponsorship is more likely to take the form of an organisation providing free premises. My last 2 chess clubs have both benefited from similar arrangements. The saving in cost can be used to buy equipment, since members can still be expected to pay a reasonable membership fee, and to build up the club's reserves in the event that the arrangement changes.
I am not aware of any cases where local businesses provide direct sponsorship to clubs, although plenty of teams have been sponsored in 4NCL. But when you think about it, I wonder how many chess club organisers have approached local businesses and asked the question?

This is a reasonably common phenomena for grass roots table tennis clubs.

One of mine is sponsored by a local Chinese take-away / restaraunt
Another is sponsored by a local insurance company.

Table tennis clubs are quite good at getting results and stories and photographs into local papers and local radio.

Chess clubs are less expert at these activities.

I've never been in a club that had sponsorship, but if you want to go down that road, you have to look at what the sponsor is going to get out of it, and what you have to offer.

If your club already has a proven track record of organising events that regularly get media coverage, even if it is just the local paper, that might interest a potential sponsor. If it's just, "We need money!", that won't really cut it, unless of course someone in the club is high up in a local business and just wants to help out the club.

It used to be quite common for there to be local sponsorship of chess activity. I have no idea whether it is still possible. Banks used to have a sum of money that the manager could assign as he wished. Certainly Richmond Junior Chess Club benefited. I remember speaking to my Midland Bank Manager about this, when I was discussing other business.
Britidh Championship in Plymouth, NatWest was quite interested in supporting the event. But they withdrew when they realised it was a national event, not local.
You can try a local Chamber of Commerce and circulate their members. This is more like patronage than sponsorship. If somebody thinks the cause worthwhile, they may support it. This has virtually died out in England as The Thatcher government discouraged local 'patriotism'. But it is alive and well in Gibraltar.
The problem is getting next to a potential donor. i.e. networking. Then convincing them of the benefit of your project.

I am pondering suggesting to my captain that he try and get funds for badly-needed new clocks from the council or NHS, though obviously a relationship with someone in the private sector would be helpful. Pubs and so on not really on since we meet in a CIU club anyway. Suspect the local clubs with 'star' juniors would stand more chance of doing a deal and getting good coverage for the sponsor from it.

Don't really feel I can get directly involved myself because I work for the Council, but there seems to me to be good evidence that chess is one of the ways of keeping older people mentally and socially active, which extends the amount of time they will be able to care for themselves rather than require care, so given that our club is very grey and very working class, I'm sure someone can find a few hundred quid...