Sponsorships can be a powerful marketing and public relations vehicle. Clearly, the right sponsorship relationships can add rich value to a company’s employee care, customer care and community care priorities. And that is why building trust and confidence is the single most important factor in attracting, securing and retaining the commitment of a community partner’s money, time, effort and expertise.

The best coaches will tell you that they are, first and foremost, students of their area of expertise. That is why I produced a “PBK Sponsorship Confidence Survey”. In producing this survey, I invited 150 senior sponsorship decision makers in the business, community, government, and voluntary sectors to provide their responses to the open-ended statement, “The three points during a sponsorship relationship when I feel most confident are…”

A total of 60% of the individuals receiving this e-mail survey chose to respond – half of the survey respondents were business sponsorship decision makers. The survey also helped PBK design a comprehensive 30-step checklist for developing sponsorships, which is designed to help event organizers delight their sponsors.

While the sample size is not as quantitatively deep as it could be, the results were revealing. Specifically, the survey identified the qualities that people on both sides of the sponsorships deal find important to their confidence in any given relationship.

What stands out most is the emphasis that business people place on post-event measurement as a confidence-building element, in contrast to event organizers, who are more concerned with pre-event dealings such as connecting with the right people and securing contracts.

Here are some highlights of the PBK Sponsorship Confidence Survey:

• Responses generally covered confidence factors before, during and after an event sponsorship. Feedback was then summarized under these three categories: reaching a sponsorship agreement; implementation of the event; and measurement of returns.
• 30% of community event organizer responses were associated with reaching an agreement, as compared to 20% for the business people who participated in the survey.
• Community event organizers feel most confident at points during the implementation of the event (50%), as compared to 40% of business respondents.
• 40% of business responses pointed to measurement factors as important to their feeling confident with sponsorship partners, as opposed to 20% of event organizers.

 

A clearer understanding of the key variables and specific activities that go into successful sponsorships will benefit all partners. For instance, rather than holding their evaluation criteria close to the vest, business people would do well to share their specific sponsorship models at the outset of relationships with community event organizers whom they have chosen to sponsor.

Event organizers, on the other hand, need to do a better job of developing sponsorship policies and program objectives and share them up front with prospective sponsors. To enhance trust and build confidence with their community partners, event organizers would do well to become better at measuring and reporting progress and results to event sponsors. Working together with sponsors on objectives and reporting would in itself serve as a significant confidence builder.

I believe adamantly that event organizers would build confidence with existing and prospective sponsors by spending more of their time and focus on “friend raising,” and less emphasis on pure fundraising. Business sponsors would strengthen confidence among community partners, while optimizing their financial investments, by contributing more “emotional commitment” to a sponsorship relationship.

The world of event sponsorships will be better for everyone when all community partners work together to build true friendships, based on mutual trust, confidence and a clear understanding of objectives, benefits and measurement of what matters most to their respective efforts.

This article by Pat Kahnert originally appeared in PR Canada. Pat is a fee-for-service corporate marketing and communications consultant, helping business, not-for-profit and government organizations to add clarity, credibility and impact to their work. He is an accomplished community coach, guest columnist and popular speaker – covering topics like corporate social responsibility, community relationship building, effective team building and corporate communications effectiveness. Pat can be reached at pbk@cogeco.ca, or 905-337-7933.