A company that intends to support a team or an athlete by investing in them must know clearly what its goal is and determine from the outset whether it is a financial support-only operation or instead a long-term project to be developed and exploited in various ways.

Both sponsorship and donation involve a monetary investment, but while the former is a marketing tool, the latter is a gesture of goodwill toward the community. Donation and sponsorship are both attractive operations but have different purposes. For both sports sponsorship and donation involves a monetary investment toward a third party, the two operations have substantial differences especially in terms of marketing.

First and foremost, sponsorship grants the sponsoring company the opportunity to acquire the image and marketing rights of a team, athlete or event; for example, the ability to use the name, fame and image of key athletes for commercial and communication purposes. Sports sponsorship is an essential marketing tool and certainly a very effective one.

On the other hand, however, donation should never be used for commercial and marketing purposes. Although it is often used as a PR tool, donation should be seen as a pure and simple act of benevolence and generosity; people or companies give what they want to organizations or individuals in need of help.
Expecting a marketing return as a result of a donation is certainly unethical.

The distinction must therefore be clear.

So why is it that when it comes to sports, donations and sponsorship are often confused?

Avoiding going too deep, we can say that social responsibility campaigns are often seen as on the borderline between a donation and a long-term sponsorship. It should be clear that this is not the case. Take for example a sponsorship campaign involving a youth soccer team. Sponsorship in this case involves covering kit costs, stadium costs, or one’s logo on communication materials. As a sponsor, you have a strategic purpose and work closely with the team in order to help them and at the same time, however, to show and promote the support activity in which you are involved.

Making a donation to the same youth soccer team means giving charitable support , without expecting to have a return on image and without having influence in how the investment will be used.
The donor cannot expect to have influence in the decisions made by the team.

Tax benefits for donations

If you make a donation to a team or organization that is duly registered as a charity, you have the option of deducting the expenses. Donations of this type can be deducted from the profits the company made in the year of the donation, so you can expect to pay less tax. More information on this can be found (if you are a company in the UK) on the Gov.uk site. on the same site you can clearly find the difference between donation and sponsorship: “investments in sponsorship are different from donations because your company receives something in return from the sponsoring entity” e.g. image exploitation rights, free tickets, etc.

Sponsorships and donations in MotoGP

If you are investing in MotoGP, it is very likely that yours is a sponsorship and not a donation.

In any case if you have are interested in supporting the sport in any way you can always contact us using info@rtrsports.com