i'm posting this on several offroad magazine websites.  So if you respond to another sites posting you need not respond here as well.

I have been asked to approach you on behalf of The BackCountry Crawlers for information on procuring sponsors for and magazine coverage of our annual offroading event... I am one of nearly 40 members of the club located in Casper, Wyoming.  We have hosted and organized the event with permission from the local branch of the BLM for the last two years at our local ORV park.  Our first year drew 12 vehicles to the competition and some 50 spectators, while this year we had 34 vehicles competiting and well over 100 spectators and we expect many more next year... We have gained sponsorship for the event from several local vendors and businesses, but these businesses have little to do with the genre of offroading... my question to anyone who wishes to answer is how do we go about bringing in someone from the magazine to possibly do a small writeup on the event, and who would we contact with the larger sponsors in the offroading world...

Any help would be greatly appreciated  

Your best bet with this is to hit Contact Us at the bottom of this page and send this same message to the Editor. Thats not to say that he won't see it here, but that will be sure to get it under his nose. If it's something hes interested in he will assign one of his minions to cover it. Good luck!  

thank you very much...  

ok... well...i've emailed the editors... and gotten no response yet... but i wouldn't mind input from anyone who can help...  

Maybe more info on the event. What kind of comp is it? Maybe a lnk to a website with pics and rules. Good luck to you and btw this would be something I would enjoy reading in a magazine.

Bryan
www.offlimits4wd.com  

here's some more infoPoison Spider Challeng forum topic  

Due to (a) the number of invitations we receive to trail rides across the country each year, (b) our limited travel budgets, and (c) the number of trail rides we are committed to cover in advance every year, as a rule we're not able to attend these types of events unless the host organization is willing to cover our expenses for the weekend (airfare, lodging, gas, etc.). Your best bet is to look around and see if you can find someone with a digital camera who can shoot decent photos, and perhaps even write a bit, and send us a freelance article. If it’s good enough to pass muster with us, we’ll publish it and even pay you for it. A lot of writers for our magazines, including our own esteemed FW Senior Editor Brubaker, got started in the business that way.

Of course, you can use the power of our sites to post photos of your event afterwards. Eventually we hope to be able to have a “MySpace”-style feature on our sites that’ll also allow you to directly upload videos, too, but that’ll take a while yet to implement. And you can further leverage the power of our sites to advertise your event on the forums as a way to attract more people to attend. This will definitely be helpful to you down the road because . . .

Sponsors: as far as sponsorships go, you need to ask yourself, “What can I offer a potential sponsor? What can I give him in exchange for the money he’s giving me?” The answer usually comes down to one of three things: (a) Big-time attendance, (b) big-time media exposure, or (c) publicity-friendly charity work (trail clean-ups, etc.). There are nonprofits such as Tread Lightly or United Four-Wheel, who have partnerships with companies in the 4x4 marketplace such as Hummer, BFGoodrich and others, and which occasionally sponsor Adopt-a-Trail type programs. This might be a good avenue to explore in the short term as they will occasionally partner up with smaller organizations.

Again, though, you have to be able to explain exactly what you can offer the potential sponsor as a return on his investment. Manufacturers such as Jeep and Toyota also form partnerships with 4x4 organizations and events from time to time, but again, these will typically be larger events that are attended by thousands of people (e.g. Easter Jeep Safari).
 
Bottom line: For now, keep working on building up your event. Once you’ve got, say, over 100 rigs, more than 500 spectators, and an established calendar that a potential sponsor can rely on, then you can start sending queries to some of the bigger 4x4 organizations.

Douglas McColloch
Editor, Four Wheeler  

Poison Spider Challenge news coverage

Here's an article from the 2007 competition as well...Billings gazette article on Poison Spider Challenge