Being a student is the best time of your life. You don’t have to follow your parents orders, you can decide whatever you want to eat and you can party all night long, everyday of the week. However, all this fun isn’t for free. Especially not if your student association wants to organize the most awesome events and parties. In order to be able to pay all those amazing events and parties, student associations try to acquire sponsors. Nowadays, student associations face the problem of low acquisition levels because companies cut back on their sponsor expenses due to the economic crisis. How can student associations (but also other kind of associations and clubs) still gather all the money they need for their events and parties?

SponsorKliks BV found a solution to this question. Sponsorkliks.com is a platform that connect e-commerce retailers to possible customers on the principle of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a form of online marketing whereby companies sign agreements with other firms (the affiliates) to feature a link for its website on the affiliates sites. The affiliates get a commission for every click, sold product or lead to the web shop (Mariussen et al., 2010). SponsorKliks is based on a pay-per-sale approach where SponsorKliks gets a commission for everything the registered clubs buy at the contracted retailers. So, this is how it works in practice (see also figure 1):
1) A club registers itself at sponsorkliks.com.
2) Members can choose all kind of web shops by clicking on the logo of the web shop (on their club’s page of SponsorKliks).
3) The member buys an item at the web shop.
4) SponsorKliks get a commission from the web shop.
5) SponsorKliks gives 75% of this commission back to the club.

SponsorKliks sounds like the ideal way for student associations to generate extra money. Every time a member wants to buy something online, he/she only has to click on the logo of the web shop on their association’s SponsorKliks page and the association will get 75% of the commission. Although the concept sounds great, members do need to go to their association’s SponsorKliks page first. This crucial step is easy to forget for members, especially when the members of the association are barely aware of the fact that their association can get money from their purchases. Apparently SponsorKliks is also aware of this problem, so they offer registered clubs a marketing toolkit in order to increase awareness for the SponsorKliks page among members. This marketing toolkit consists of free posters and flyers and multiple tips to let members use SponsorKliks for their online purchases.

Being a student is not only having the most awesome parties with your fellow students. It is also a time of studying and reading books. Books that can (only) be bought on Bol.com or Amazon. So isn’t it great that with spending your precious money on study books, you can help your student association organize the most amazing events and parties? It’s just one extra click!

Carlijn

Reference:

• Mariussen, A., Daniele, R., and Bowie, D. (2010). Unintended consequences in the evolution of affiliate marketing networks: a complexity approach. The Service Industries Journal, 30(10), 1707-1722.
• Figure 1: Printscreen of SponsorKliks.