So what is a Sponsorship?
Every page on this site has a ‘Sponsor Badge’ at the top, populated with the name or logo of a sponsor. On Hero pages, the individual page dedicated to a specific fallen American Hero, there is usually an option to become that Hero’s Permanent Sponsor. (I say “usually” because it is possible that another person or company has already asked to be that Hero’s Permanent Sponsor for the current year.) So the first part of a sponsorship is taking that position as a Permanent Sponsor, for a specific Hero, for one year.
Additionally, because every single Hero matters, a sponsorship puts your name or logo in a pool with all other sponsors, to populate, on a rotating basis, the Sponsor Badge on pages without a Permanent Sponsor.
So both of these two separate effects come from a single sponsorship.
To be clear, the cost of a sponsorship, despite it tying a sponsor to a specific Hero, does not fund that specific Hero’s research. As I write this, the effort is still quite young, and research happens in batches; time is spent identifying and listing everyone from an entire conflict, as opposed to tracking down high school photos of a specific Hero. The goal is to raise enough to hire ten more of me so that we can chase down those high school photos concurrent to discovering and transposing names, but today I just hope for help with the direct cost of maintaining the site, and adding names from older conflicts.
A sponsorship is not an advertisement. This site is about the Heroes and who they were as people; it is not about companies increasing their traffic (although I highly encourage you to frequent companies who support the project!) There will never be flashing lights, limited time offers, nor pop-up anything, as you are connecting with these amazing men and women. A sponsorship is just like it is in little league, only the name is at the top of a page rather than the back of a uniform.
The cost of a sponsorship is $1040 per year. I’d like to say there’s some clever tie to the US, and that’s the form number most Heroes would have filed for taxes, but that’s not it. I came to that number by considering the following scenario: if I went to my local tavern for Friday Night Happy Hour, and I saw someone I came to know was a member of the US Armed Forces, and they got a beer and wings happy hour special, I would absolutely pick up that tab of a $15 special + $5 tip, and I would do it every single Friday night. That $20, every Friday night, is the cost of sponsorship; $20 a week, for 52 weeks. $1040.
Someday, when I can hire an actual programmer, becoming a sponsor will just be a series of clicks. Today is not that day. Today I have to manually enter your information, and manually attach you to a Hero, and manually put you in the pool of sponsors. So, to sponsor our Heroes, please email me your name, and the name of your Hero (if there is a specific Hero whose Permanent Sponsor you would like to be), and I will reply as quickly as possible.
Thank you for caring about these Heroes as much as I do.
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