Goals

Airtec is pleased to support a great many teams and athletes around the world who understand well that the CYPRES unit is a revolutionary device of singular quality. Sometimes people have an instinct for how best to ‘give back’ to their sponsors, but also quite often people ask for more guidance on what to do as they find their way. Here are a few pointers for how to get on the good foot… 

Keep It Clean

Getting your posts shared on social media channels works better by focusing on a single thing. If you overload a post with tag after tag and logo after logo, it is less likely to get shared. That is not to say that a great post that features the names of all of your sponsors will not get attention, but for that to fly it must really stand out. Decent efforts that present a single brand for a solid reason are the way to go.

ALL CAPS YO

CYPRES is not a true initialism but is used in the manner of SCUBA. It is not separated as C.Y.P.R.E.S – but indeed represents CYbernetic Parachute RElease System. Please use upper case letters and watch out for the sunny island of Cyprus sneaking past your spellcheck. The hashtag we use is #CYPRES and not something random you made up.  

Jerseys

Athlete jerseys are the currency of coolness. Most of your gear is visible while you are skydiving, but your CYPRES is not. Our athlete jersey is designed to pop from a distance and we would like you to wear it about the place when you can. Jersey shots are much more likely to get shared by us – or indeed used in more significant ways down the road. A handful of our athletes seem to never take them off, while another bunch seem to never put them on. Applying the jersey here and there means a lot.   

Play To Your Strengths

Be realistic about what you are offering. Remember that skydiving is a strong word-of-mouth community, and your presence and opinion both have value. We understand how things generally work, and that nobody can be everything all at once. Sometimes even the smallest things, like a sticker in just the right spot, can show us someone is out there walking the walk.

If you are grinding away training for a competition doing the same jumps over and over again it is difficult to produce varied images and videos – but as a skydiving team your influence is strong and the competitions will have things like delegation gatherings, official photographers, flags, podiums, fancy parties and such. You also have a direct connection to your national skydiving association which makes you credible and important on a larger scale.

If it is either super hot or super cold where you are it can be uncomfortable to skydive in a thin, synthetic athlete jersey, but a flag hanging from a palm tree or a wind blade sticking up out of the snow is pretty sweet. These small things can seem insignificant compared to winning medals and such, but a well-placed banner might be seen by everyone who comes to the dropzone for the next twenty years.

If you are teaching basic canopy skills all the time then the action is not exactly going to be sick, but the connections you make with your students will be filled with meaning. There are plenty of highly regarded instructors with minimal swanky online projection who routinely educate new skydivers about the products available and how to make the correct choices. If anything, these folk are some of the most valuable to a manufacturer, because they are the ones truly influencing newer skydivers to buy products.  

What Joely Thinks:

The above stuff is just what is on my mind as we move forward. If you want to boil things down to a single piece of advice it is that success with sponsorships lies in communication skills. You can be the best skydiver who ever lived but if you cannot answer your emails for shit then it will be frustrating for people who want to support you. You can also be comparatively light on natural talent, but if you know how to turn up and get things done the industry will line up to offer you help (so much this). Many people want to do the fancypants project, but way fewer will be there at 05:45 to get it done.

If you have an idea for something, ask us what we can do to help. We don’t have tons of resources to throw around for skydiver projects, but it is possible for the right thing. We will always support events arranged and attended by our athletes and will go bigger on the ones that stand out.