6 Tips to Make the Most of Your Sponsorship

The AGLCA Discussion Forum is the most popular member benefit by far. Sponsors are welcome to post in the forum in response to questions that members ask, and can also post in the Word From Our Sponsor thread with any commercial messages.

You can access the Discussion Forum on our website. Directions to find and post in the forum are below. You will need your log in information; please contact JoAnn if you need them.

    -Log in to www.greatloop.org
    -Find Interact in the menu bar, click on it, then click Forum (first thing listed).
    -A Word From Our Sponsors is near the top of the forum list; click on that.
    -To post in the forum, scroll to the bottom and type in the box there.  You can format as you like using the toolbar and click Reply when you are done!

We've been presenting many of our popular seminars as webinars, and making them available on our Vimeo page and our YouTube Channel where we have a playlist specific to our sponsors. We'd love to help you reach our members through our video platforms. If you have a commercial, power point presentation, boat walk-through, video tour of your marina, anything that helps promote your business, please send it to JoAnn and we will post it to a specific sponsor section on our page! Commercial messages are welcome, so we hope you will take advantage of this new way to reach our members. 

Our members LOVE a discount, and we have many ways to let the members know about sponsors' offers, including posting an offer in our sponsor directory! We will take care of promoting it for you on greatloop.org and you are welcome to post the details on the Discussion Forum (please let JoAnn know if you need any help with doing that).

When you signed up as a sponsor with AGLCA, you received a personalized coupon code to help your customers start a new AGLCA membership, or renew their existing membership for FREE! It's our way of helping you help YOUR customers achieve their dream of completing the Great Loop! Please let JoAnn know if you don't know your code, or would like some brochures to have on hand to give to your customers.

Now more than ever, our members are finding information online, in many instances, through social media sites. Did you know that AGLCA has over 65,000 members in our Facebook Group and nearly 24,000 followers on our Facebook page? With this tip, we offer a way for sponsors to contact AGLCA members while also reaching others who are interested in The Great Loop and boating. Sponsors are welcome to post to both America's Great Loop Cruisers' Association and The Great Loop Facebook pages. We also have Twitter and Instagram pages as well. You can tag us in the post or send me a quick note about the post to let us know to look out for it to share with the groups. America's Great Loop Cruisers' Association-Sponsors is a Facebook page specifically for sponsor information; please come Like us too!

Those who are successful in social media suggest that you use video or pictures to draw the viewers' attention, and one out of every three posts should link to your website. Your posts can provide information, promote events, and include other important updates about your business that our members and other boaters need to know.

Each level of AGLCA Sponsorship includes some amount of messaging in our digital publications that go out monthly to our members. There's the sponsor introduction in the Great Loop Link newsletter, the short write-ups in the monthly e-update, and inclusion in the Inspirations email that goes out to non-members.

That's a lot of opportunity, regardless of your sponsor level! Unfortunately, most sponsors don't use these benefits, and miss the chance to take advantage of them during their year of sponsorship. We generally include one sponsor per month in the shorter publications, and these spaces are granted on a first come, first served basis, so please keep that in mind when you request your space. We truly do our best to accommodate all requests.

Have you submitted a write-up recently? Please keep your submissions to 150 words for most of the above listed options. These write-ups can be something already on your website, or something original to draw attention to some new feature or event you want to tell AGLCA members about! You can even time them to be published in a certain time frame (please just give us a few weeks' notice!). All write-ups are published accompanied by your logo, so please make sure we have your most up-to-date logo as well. We can also use video footage along with your write-up (links through YouTube work best).