September 14, 2026
Every year brands spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach people who might care about what they sell. A running brand's best customer is someone who runs three mornings a week, owns four pairs of shoes, and will not stop talking about it. That person is already standing in a parking lot at 6am with 299 others, in a run club, led by someone buying the coffee out of their own pocket.
Brands have always reached those 300 runners the long way around: digital ads, race sponsorships, influencer deals. All of it goes around the club rather than through it. Which is backwards, because the club is the single biggest influence in those runners' lives. When the leader says a shoe is worth trying, people try it. That is not a media buy. That is a friend recommendation.
Why we built cash sponsorships on Heylo
Ask a group leader how much they have spent on their own community and most of them have to think about it, because they have spent a lot and stopped counting. Snacks, venue deposits, a banner, extra t-shirts that no one claimed, a race entry for someone who could not afford one. It gets treated as part of the deal.
It should not be. A group that meets every week, fills a café, and turns strangers into friends is building authenticity that brands crave. Groups have what every brand actually wants: people who care enough to show up. Not followers, not impressions, not an audience that scrolled past something on the way to somewhere else. People who set an alarm, drove across town, and stood in a parking lot in the cold because they said they would.
A good sponsorship is not something members tolerate. It is something that makes the group better: a local roaster covering the post-run coffee, a shoe brand turning up with demo pairs, a gym opening its showers on long-run days. Members get something real, the brand reaches people who actually want what it sells, and the group gets funded. Sponsorship only goes wrong when it is done to a community instead of with one. Everything we built is for the second kind.
Cash sponsorships between brands and community groups already exist. They just happen far less often than they should, because everything around the deal is hard. What to charge. What to promise. Who writes the contract, who sends the invoice, who handles the tax form, who checks that the work actually got done. Any one of those is enough to stall a conversation both sides wanted to have.
That is the friction we set out to remove. When sponsoring a group is easy, more brands do it, more groups get funded, and more of that money goes into communities instead of ad platforms.
What we learned running over 70 sponsorships by hand
Before building anything, we brokered sponsorships ourselves: over 70 groups and more than $100,000 into leaders' bank accounts. Six things stood out.
Cash makes groups better. This is the one we most hoped was true, and the data backs it. Across the groups we sponsored, check-ins nearly doubled: 98% more members checked in during the sponsorship than in the same stretch before it. Seven in ten groups saw an increase, with a median lift of 28%.
None of that money sits in an account. Leaders put it straight back into the group. One leader was waiting on a payout to buy equipment for Saturday's run club. Another was putting theirs toward materials for a field day in September. It shows up as a bigger event, a venue that actually got rented, a coach who got paid, or simply a leader who does not burn out because they stopped quietly subsidizing their own community.
Brands need more than a link to justify the spend. No brand manager can put "we sponsored a run club" with a link to Instagram into a budget review presentation and leave it there. They need real numbers. Every sponsorship on Heylo now reports impressions, clicks, and completed deliverables back to the sponsor in real time. That is what closes the loop, and it is what turns a one-off test into a renewal.
Brand fit matters more than money. The most common question was never how much. It was who.
One leader told us they would be "fairly particular about not working with extractive corporations." Another asked us to come back only when we had female-owned brands. A third put it best: "when I think about sponsors, I would want sponsors that are super brand aligned. Getting brands that really connect to our customers is the most ideal state."
The best groups only work with brands they believe in, and that selectivity is exactly what makes the partnership authentic. It is also what makes it work for the brand. A sponsor a leader is proud of gets talked about. A sponsor a leader merely tolerated gets one post and nothing else. This is good friction, and we built the product to keep it rather than optimize it away.
What holds sponsorships back is not whether they work. Not once did a group or a brand tell us the sponsorship itself was a bad idea. What stalled deals was everything around them: pricing, negotiation, contracts, invoicing, payments, taxes.
One leader had a supplement brand approach them directly, said the brand and audience "fits us very well," and then told us: "I'm not really sure what we can offer." That conversation should have become a sponsorship. It did not, and the reason had nothing to do with the group or the brand. Heylo now handles all of it.
Groups have influence well beyond their member count. Active members and weekly attendance are the easiest things to measure, and they understate the group's impact. Groups carry large Instagram followings. Members with audiences of their own amplify without being asked. One leader ran a sponsored post to their personal following alongside the group's. Another asked whether the banner could go on their global page rather than a single city, because the group spans markets.
A 300-person club is not just a 300-person audience.
Leaders could not believe how simple it was to run sponsorship on Heylo. "Dashboard itself when you in the sponsorship is amazing though very straight forward," one leader wrote to us mid-campaign. Another said what she appreciated most was how easy it was to send the announcement out.
That is the bar. The deliverables dashboard shows what is due, what is done, and what has been paid, and submitting proof takes a couple of taps.
How cash sponsorships work on Heylo
Your group gets a sponsorship link. Put it in your Instagram bio, email it to a local business, or send it to your members and ask who they know. A brand opens it and requests to sponsor you. Our guide on how to get sponsorships covers who to pitch first.
You approve the brand and send your offers. You never have to invent a price: Heylo drafts them for you from what brands have actually paid groups like yours, and you customize what you charge and what you deliver as best for you and your group. Once the brand accepts, Heylo handles the contract, the invoice, the tax forms, and the payment, and the money lands in your account at the end of the month. Brands cover our fee, so your group keeps the full payout.
You decide which brand gets in
No brand reaches your members without your approval. Counter anything you do not like, decline anyone who is not a fit, and if you never approve a single brand, nothing about your group changes.
That is the part we were most careful about. Your members trust you, and that trust is the whole thing. It is not ours to spend.
Your group has been worth this all along.
Every week you get people out of their houses and into the same place, on purpose, because they want to be there. Brands spend fortunes trying to manufacture that and rarely get it right. The only thing missing was a way to get paid for it without it becoming another job. That part is now built.