Freeman Brothers is a funeral director first established in Horsham, West Sussex, in 1855. The company now has a further three offices across the county in Billingshurst, Crawley and Hurstpierpoint. Members of the team often assist with local community groups and events – Becky explains more here…
When our Community programme launched in 2017, things were very different to how they are now. My role had been created with the assumption that I’d be involved with a lot of community events and, until March 2020, that was generally the case.
With the onset of the pandemic came a lot of change, and with no in person events to attend, I supported some digital ones and spent much of my time handling communications for Freeman Brothers.
We’ve found that some events have been very slow to return, with some people justifiably being more cautious than others. Equally, consumer appetites have changed, leading to an adjustment to requests for support.
Something which has always been offered to our community via my role is an exchange of expertise. My early career background is in event management and marketing, meaning that I’m well-placed to support small community organisations in particular. In my experience, these groups are often enthusiastically-serviced by a team of volunteers from a variety of backgrounds, but they may lack some knowledge in order to achieve the best result from their promotional activities.
This is where our support can come in! Recently, I was contacted by Billingshurst Bowling Club, who were looking to set up their first sponsorship agreements. The Club hadn’t set any packages up yet, and so I provided some suggestions regarding how they might proceed, and offered to review their proposal and provide feedback. My advice had been to ask for what they wanted, rather than allowing potential sponsors to make a blind offer – I see this often, and it tends to come from a lack of confidence; many groups are afraid of asking for ‘too much’ when, in fact, this can discourage some sponsors. Not seeing a cost attached to something means that some will assume they can’t afford to get involved, as a large sum is expected, and others will under-bid without guidance. When you offer a clearly defined set of packages, detailing fees and the benefits a sponsor will receive, informed decisions can be made, and parity is assured.
I made these suggestions and, a short time later, I duly received a brilliant sponsorship proposal, including details of available options. The Club had made great progress, and the new document also helped me to better understand what they were hoping to achieve. One of my initial pieces of advice had been that they may wish to have a target in mind for how much they’d like to raise in funds via sponsorship, and that it’s therefore possible to reverse engineer your success. There was one option that I commonly see which they still hadn’t offered, and so I made the suggestion, letting them know that there was one more item they may wish to add, if it suited them.
Sure enough, this was indeed the case, and the Club were delighted with my idea. As a result, we have collaborated on a sponsorship which is seeing Freeman Brothers support their finals weekend at the end of August 2024. This also helps to put the Club slightly ahead of their target: with the season drawing to a close for the year, they had anticipated starting to receive sponsorship for 2025, so they are now prepared to launch these packages, and have also received some sponsorship during 2024 that they may not otherwise have had.
It’s great to be able to support community organisations in this way. Along similar themes, I’ve also offered basic event management training, social media support, and other advice in terms of marketing and communications. We’re always happy to share this kind of information – if you are a community group in West Sussex and would benefit from similar help, please get in touch and we will do our best to assist.
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