College Athletics - Sponsor United Work
I earned my SponsorUnited certification by completing training on the platform and applying it to mock NIL partnership plans for real college athletes. SponsorUnited is a sponsorship intelligence platform that lets users search brands by category, region, and league. It also shows a brand’s sponsorship history, target audience, objectives, and the athletes and teams it has already partnered with. For each plan, I researched a student-athlete’s background, interests, and social media presence, filtered the platform to the categories that fit them, and chose a brand whose existing sponsorships made a deal believable. One plan paired a Furman men’s soccer player with a local boutique hotel, and the other paired a University of Kentucky volleyball player with Gatorade. Each plan covered why the brand fit, why the athlete fit, and a sample Instagram caption with the tagging and ad disclosure that NIL deals require.
The hard part was making each pairing realistic rather than just recognizable. Gatorade was a natural fit for a Division I volleyball player, but for a freshman soccer player’s first NIL deal, I looked at local and regional brands and used the platform’s deal data to find a hotel that had not yet worked with a male athlete or reached the Furman community. Through this experience, I strengthened my skills in sponsorship research, brand and athlete matching, audience analysis, and NIL partnership planning, and I learned to back up every recommendation with data.