Really good sponsorship brokers are rare. They have extensive connections, strong skills, and a good work ethic. They’ll represent your property well, deal with you professionally, and will be worth every penny they cost. Unfortunately, unscrupulous broker scams appear to be on the rise, and it’s causing immense damage to… Read More
Sponsorship is an exciting, vibrant, creative, and ever-changing industry. We’re lucky to be a part of it. But like all jobs, there are parts that are definitely less sexy than others. Right at the bottom of that list is creating a sponsorship policy. But just because it’s one of the… Read More
I’ve blogged on and on about the big issues that affect our industry; about the critical factors that drive sponsorship results. But sometimes, it’s not the big mistakes that trip sponsors up. Sometimes it’s just getting one or two things wrong that undoes every other great thing you try to… Read More
The sponsorship industry is rife with advice on how to sell sponsorship. A quick search of the web will net you literally thousands of articles telling you which sponsors to target, how to contact the right people, how to develop offers, how to write proposals, on and on and on.… Read More
Sponsors mean money, so it makes perfect sense to try to retain all of the sponsors you possibly can. Honestly, though, there are times when you will be better off without a sponsor – even if that means you need to do the hard work to replace them. In other… Read More
A few years ago, I started using a new word around sponsorship – “privilege”. At one point, I was trying to convey the critical importance of putting your target markets first when developing a leverage plan, when I blurted out something like this: Sponsorship provides you with the privilege to… Read More
This now fully updated blog has been the most popular blog on this website since it was first posted. Meeting with, and getting your offer to, the right person is a combination of knowing what roles to target, and finding their contact information. This blog is a starting point. Do… Read More
I’m often asked by clients to assist in writing the job description for hiring and managing sponsorship staff. What I come up with is invariably different than they thought it would be, with less emphasis on experience and more on their intrinsic traits. Let’s face it, corporate sponsorship is an… Read More
For most sponsors, decisions to invest in or renew a sponsorship are based primarily on analysis against a set of criteria. This may seem sensible, and bean counters love this approach, but it doesn’t actually work very well with sponsorship. I’ll go so far as to say that using analysis… Read More
A few years back, I read an article entitled, “The Impact of Sponsorship on Share Price Brand Value”. The main assertion is that companies that sponsor have better performing share prices than companies that don’t. While that was the first time I’d seen anyone make that contention in any serious… Read More
We’ve all been there. You start negotiating a sponsorship that you thought was a dead cert to renew, and it’s suddenly looking like a lost cause. You hadn’t seen the warning signs they were planning to exit, but to be honest, you weren’t really looking, and now you’ve got a… Read More
First right of refusal is a valuable defensive benefit for a sponsor, guaranteeing them the opportunity to review and take up a new sponsorship at the end of the contract, before it’s offered to a competitor. The parties involved often assume that means it needs to be a similar offer… Read More