Sponsors are DIFFERENT from donors.
Donors donate for a variety of reasons (not usually connected to marketing their businesses) and need to see the VALUE of your organization and its contributions to the community..

and will use funds earmarked as donations coming out of personal or corporate contributions budget. Sponsors are interested in helping your organization AND promoting their businesses in some way so they need to see the VALUE your sponsorship opportunity has in terms of biggest marketing exposure (bang) for their marketing budget (buck) which is then written off as a business expense. Don’t ask sponsors to donate; ask them to invest in a marketing opportunity.

Your sponsorship levels and exhibitor fees need to be in line with the number of expected attendees.

As a general rule of thumb – start the title sponsorship at 10 x the number of projected attendees and tweak it up or down from there depending on publicity opportunities, the value of other benefits offered and your target audience. If you have a star-studded event or nationally recognized speakers (which may parlay into additional publicity) you are likely to be able to command larger amounts of sponsorship dollars. Exhibitor space should be sold at approximately $1 per expected attendee – so if you’re expecting 250 attendees, charge $250 for booth space.

Your sponsorship package is your SALES tool (yes, you need a sales tool)

So make it pretty, reflecting your brand, and make sure it includes:

1. BRIEF overview of your event and your organization and/or flyer for the event and organizational brochure

2. Letter from the event chair outlining the overall benefits of becoming a sponsor; don’t forget to list the number of past / projected attendees and any special publicity opportunities. For larger events, it is helpful to outline event attendee demographics and the number of website visitors you have if the website will be included in the levels.

3. 3-5 levels with DETAILED outline of sponsor benefits/recognition

4. One registration form - Don’t be mean and make people fill out multiple forms for different aspects of your sponsorship or exhibitor opportunities; if you need to know what info they want in a program listing, identify those fields in the one form.

Make your sponsorship levels different from each other.

Your sponsorship levels should have significant differences between them so that when a company is trying to decide between them, the answer would be OBVIOUS – they will be able to clearly and quickly identify what would be valuable to them but ONLY if it’s easy to see the value. The next package up needs to have a significant carrot dangling from it (that is not available in every package) to entice people up.

Don’t forget the follow-up calls

You can send out the packet, but don’t expect everyone to jump on the bandwagon without a “sales” call to close the deal. Line up your best volunteers, or use your development staff if you have one, to contact each potential sponsor. Think of it as donor prospecting (which it very well could be in the future) and develop a list of potential sponsors based on staff, board, volunteer, and/or member connections, and determine how much you think they would sponsor and ask them for that level of sponsorship.

Examples

Eastern Ontario Economic Showcase with Donald J. Trump
2009 SWE Region E Conference
AFPMA 2009 conference on philanthropy
The Magic of Monte Carlo Golf Tournament & Casino Night

Related Articles:
A Class of its Own – The benefits of a separate event website

Comments are closed.