Sponsors and other corporate partners can provide assistance in greening your team’s operations. In addition, collaboration with sponsors can also foster a greater knowledge of your team’s efforts in the community.

Consider contacting sponsors to inform them of your team’s efforts to enhance its environmental performance, and to see what role they might be able to play in advancing your goals. Also consider that these issues may already be important to some sponsors, and this guide could be usefully adapted by your sponsors for their own practices. As a result of this work, sponsors may be willing to investigate the environmental impacts of their own products.

When involving sponsors, start small, and focus on promoting a greater awareness of environmental concerns. Small steps are important. They create awareness, change attitudes, and can start a company on along a more environmentally responsible path.

Dear _______,

The Baltimore Orioles have initiated an effort to improve our environmental performance in all aspects of our operations. As a sponsor of the Orioles, we would like to meet with you to discuss these objectives in more detail.

The awareness and involvement of our sponsors can play an important role in advancing and publicizing our efforts. We would also be interested to hear about your own efforts to improve environmental performance.

Please call me as soon as you can so that we can set a time for a meeting to pursue this discussion.

Involved sponsors can provide financial and organizational support to your environmental efforts. Sponsors may bring revenue, advertisements, and products, such as sports equipment and apparel, to the greening effort. Also talk with your sponsors about providing recycling containers or other environmental services to your facility.

Involving sponsors is important not just because of the publicity benefits that it offers. Sponsor involvement can help move the marketplace towards more sustainable behavior. Involving your sponsors sends a valuable signal to the corporate world that environmental issues are important to your team. Every company that requests environmentally preferable products from its suppliers sends a signal that these kinds of requests may become more common.