Iv had this question a few times on my blog and on some of the forums so i thought id write a quick post to link to if people want to know what i did to get official companys to give you sponsorship, below is the response, hope this helps people.
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Basically what i did was go to the potential sponsors website, search for the "contact us" bit, look for public relations or press, if all else fails just send it to customer services, email the company and explain who you are, what you are doing, and where your doing it. Make sure you tell the people how many views your thread has, and how many views the site gets overall (sitemeter at the bottom usually). Make sure you tell them you will feature there hardware and advertise there gear in your work log in the form of banners and logo's.
To get more chance of further sponsorship deals iv copied my work log to a few different forums. (5 so far)
The idea is to email as many different company's as you can, the way i see it is like this, if 99 of them say no, then 1 off them will say yes. My sent box says iv sent over 200 hundred emails to different companys. Perserverance is the key, email them over and over until you get a response, if the response is no, email them again in a month when you have more views/other sponsors, sponsors are a lot more likely to want to sponsor you if they see other companys on board.
Dont ever think that your project is not good enough to receive sponsorship, your showing initiative and creativity by even attempting it, you dont have to be arrogant/self important or even well known in the comunity. Companys spend millions on advertising, sending out the odd ex-sample motherboard in exchange for free advertisment is a smart PR move,especially as the advertising is directly targeted at the right audience.
Good luck.
j5
