Who wants to sponsor me to drive to Croatia?
Monday, February 4th, 2008 
Last year, two friends and I took part in the Student Brakeaway, a rally to the south of Spain. It’s like the Gumball Rally but just for students and with much, much cheaper cars! It was a phenomenal holiday, overtaking drunk students on a French motorway in a battered Nissan Micra (yes, really!) by day and drinking in a different town by night. The guys at Student Brakeaway have released the route for this year, a1900 mile trek through France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. Needless to say, I really want to go again.
Herein lies the issue. The ‘holiday’ is actually quite expensive. There’s the car and it’s servicing, accessories, petrol and insurance; the holiday itself and associated expenses such as food and (lots of) drink; accomodation for the drive back and finally, the hidden expense of last year, the bloomin’ plethora of toll roads. The majority of other cars on the route had sponsors and accessories paid for by businesses (including a sex doll, bizarrely). We had some electrical hazard tape slapped on the roof and our team number printed out on colour A4 and sellotaped to the back window. Proper students!
Obviously, we pay for the holiday and holiday expenses ourselves but I really want sponsorship or a nice slush fund paid for by fundraising to help accomodate the other costs of the trip ie. the car, petrol, tolls etc, with a substantial percentage going to charity as that’s part of the reason the rally runs. So far, the event has raised £75,000 for several charities including Teenage Cancer Trust.
How do I raise the funds, then, and will people sponsor me? I have a few ideas, and I’d like your advice on whether you think you they’re decent ideas, and whether you’d be willing to put forward a quid or two!
I was thinking about setting up a site/blog for our ‘team’ to detail the event, have a shop with stuff other drivers will need, details of last year’s event; that kind of thing. My idea is to place some kind of “sponsor a mile” bit, where you put forward £1 for a mile. Each pound gets a link back to your site, almost like the Million Dollar Pixel Page. That’s 1900 miles with the last few miles being sold for a bit more than £1 if it works out. If I could get around 500 miles sponsored, I would start taking the idea to the press releases and see if I can then get it filled that way.
However, Google obviously isn’t going to like 1900 links but perhaps I could separate these onto other pages e.g. a page for England, a page for Belgium etc. Also, I don’t have a strong domain with which to really interest potential ‘link buyers’ or sponsors. My strongest is Hanlor, a shopping portal which is currently being massively redeveloped. It has no backlinks (that I’m aware of), is almost 2 years old but has a PR of 2 with pages one level down with PR1. Our team name last year was don’t tell my mom (long story) and I have that domain which is also 2 years old but due to it being redirected incorrectly and having no content, it has no PageRank. I also have about 13 other domains, most of which aren’t yet developed but I’m open to sponsorship requests.
So other than the ’sponsor a mile’ idea, I could simply sell adverts on the new ‘team’ website or hope that this affiliate marketing takes off and I raise enough money regardless of sponsorship. Most students took the normal route of selling space on their cars, something which I would be very happy with, but I don’t know who would sponsor the car.
What do you think? And more importantly, do you fancy sponsoring me to drive to Croatia and back? 
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