STATE SPORTS ASSOCIATION OF THURINGIA AND MYFAVORITO LAUNCH DIGITAL SPONSORSHIP PLATFORM

Erfurt, June 20,2018 – Under the motto "Shop Local – Support Your Club", MyFavorito is launching Lieblingsvereinsponsor.de, a new initiative and digital sponsorship platform designed to connect amateur sports in Thuringia with local and regional brands, retailers, and restaurants. The initiative is supported by the State Sports Association of Thuringia (Landessportbund Thüringen), which has taken on the role of patron. This pilot project has already gained significant attention beyond Thuringia's borders.

Amateur sports in Thuringia are a vital part of community life, contributing to health, well-being, leisure activities for all ages, elite sports, Olympic medals, and more. However, club budgets are strained, and many clubs struggle to find suitable sponsors to support athletes, teams, youth programs, equipment, and club activities.

Meanwhile, many Thuringian brands, retailers, and restaurateurs are eager to build stronger customer relationships, drive foot traffic, boost customer loyalty and recommendations, and ultimately increase sales and growth. To achieve these goals, businesses are investing heavily in online marketing. In the past year alone, German companies transferred over €6 billion to Silicon Valley platforms like Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram.

Yet, with nearly 3,500 clubs and over 400,000 organized members, Thuringia’s sports clubs represent the largest "influencer platform" in the state, reaching virtually every resident. Historically, connecting clubs with potential sponsors has been challenging—too fragmented, difficult to measure, and labor-intensive.

A New Solution for Clubs and Sponsors
MyFavorito, a startup based in Erfurt and San Francisco, aims to solve these challenges with an innovative digital sponsorship platform. Unlike traditional sponsorship models where companies decide which clubs to support, Lieblingsvereinsponsor.de empowers clubs—and especially their fans—to take the lead. Instead of relying on hard-to-measure advertising on banners, jerseys, or newsletters (which hold limited appeal for most companies in amateur sports), the platform focuses on measurable, direct customer interactions, store visits, and sales.

"Favorite Club Sponsors" include businesses integral to fans' everyday lives, such as local food producers, supermarkets, cinemas, boutiques, cultural venues, transportation providers, beverage manufacturers, restaurants, gas stations, energy suppliers, hair salons, and car dealerships. Sponsors offer incentives like:

• "Spend €20 in my store, and I’ll donate €2 to your favorite club."
• "Buy two movie tickets, and €3 will go to your club."
• "Watch my latest ad, and I’ll sponsor €1 for your club.

"Fans can also earn rewards for engaging in activities like reading social media posts, listening to radio ads, recommending the sponsor to friends, shopping online, and more.

How It Works
Clubs rally their extensive networks of fans, players, members, parents, and spectators to engage with sponsors’ offers, choosing which club will receive the sponsorship fee. Fans themselves earn loyalty points from the sponsors, redeemable for exciting rewards. This interaction establishes a direct customer relationship between fans and sponsors, potentially generating recurring sponsorship fees for the clubs.

Fans' choices automatically forge partnerships between businesses and clubs. Companies become sponsors for dozens of clubs, while clubs gain numerous new sponsors. Comprehensive real-time reporting allows businesses to track which clubs generate the most fan engagement, while clubs can monitor their earnings from sponsorships. MyFavorito processes the sponsorship fees and distributes them to the respective clubs multiple times per month.

The best sponsors, most active clubs, and latest offers are showcased on the Lieblingsvereinsponsor.de website. New clubs and sponsors can sign up anytime. Participation is free for clubs, while sponsors pay a small monthly fee and a percentage of the sponsorship amount.

Support from the State Sports Association of Thuringia
Connecting sports clubs with business partners is a key objective of the State Sports Association of Thuringia. This pilot project aligns with that mission, and the association is helping to promote the platform among Thuringian clubs.

Other key partners include DOSB-affiliated DSA (German Sports ID), DEHOGA Thuringia, Microsoft, the Ministry of Economics, Science, and Digital Society of Thuringia, and the Thuringian Food Network, which represents about a quarter of the region’s manufacturers, collectively generating over €1 billion in revenue.
 

About MyFavorito

MyFavorito is a B2C CRM platform designed to help companies in the consumer goods (FMCG), retail, and hospitality industries establish direct, personal relationships with millions of customers. By driving store visits, loyalty, referrals, and sales, the cloud-based, mobile-first platform offers:•   

• Engagement tools that customers love to use.
• A 360-degree customer database.
• An AI-powered, fully automated sales engine that delivers the right offer to the right customer at the right time.

Initial clients like McDonald’s, Diageo, Globus, and ECE have used MyFavorito to build over 20 times more customer relationships than through social media, significantly increasing store visits, sales, and growth.

Founded in 2015 by Dirk and Mark Schlenzig in Erfurt, Germany, MyFavorito expanded in 2016 with an office in Silicon Valley, partnering with 500 Startups and Microsoft to accelerate its global growth strategy.

For more information and a free 30-day trial, visit http://www.myfavorito.com .