SPONSORSHIP

What is Sponsorship?

The purchase (either with cash or in-kind support) of exploitable rights and marketing benefits (tangible and intangible) that arise from direct involvement with a personality/player, special event, program, club or agency.

The trinity of sponsor, event and audiences

Mutual benefits sought by events and their sponsors

Is the event ‘sponsor-ready’?

• To seek sponsorship, events should have: – Sufficient rights or benefits to offer

sponsors

– Stakeholder approval of commercial sponsorship

– A policy indicating the suitability of different types of organisations as event sponsors

– Resources including personnel to market and manage sponsorship(s)

Marketing benefits of sponsorship

• Creating goodwill and consent for a firm’s activities

• Corporate brand image creation/enhancement

• Accessing niche markets

• Building brand awareness at product/service levels

• Influencing consumer attitudes about brands

Marketing benefits of sponsorship (cont)

• Associating a brand with a lifestyle that an event reflects

• Improving links with product distributors

• Product/service sales and merchandising opportunities

• Highlighting product attributes

• Rewarding staff

• Entertaining key clients at events

Sponsorship leveraging

• Leveraging an event or festival sponsorship involves the development of a range of marketing activities that extend the sponsorship benefits well beyond the event or festival’s promised offer.

Stages in developing the event sponsorship strategy

• Developing an event sponsorship policy • Profiling the event or festival audience • Creating an asset register • Building an event sponsor portfolio • Matching event assets with potential

sponsors

Stages in developing the event sponsorship strategy (cont)

• Preparing sponsorship proposals

• Screening processes and contract negotiation

• Servicing and managing the sponsorship

• Measuring and evaluating sponsorships

Rules in professional sponsorship proposal writing:

Rule #1 Provide details

• A sponsorship proposal, if accepted by the

sponsor, becomes the basis of the agreement struck between the sponsor and the organization.

• It therefore needs to be fully detailed so that there can be no uncertainty or confusion later about what was agreed. For example, if the proposal includes signage then there is a necessity to fully detail: size, content, position, who pays, period sign will remain in place.

Rule #2 Promise only what you can deliver

• It is a frequent issue with sponsors that organizations and in particular sporting organizations do not live up to their promises. Unless you are certain that the benefits will be delivered, do not put it into the proposal.

Rule #3 Ensure your proposal is easy to read

• Spacing your proposal out will also advance readability. The document may be 4-5 pages long with each page having a separate section.

• An attractive cover page that presents a professional image is also useful. It is a good idea to avoid tacky clipart or poor quality pictures on your cover page. Imported photographs look good on your computer screen but rarely do they print well, even with laser printers.

Rule #4 Avoid presenting a proposal in the

form of a letter • In order to do justice to your document it is not

recommended that a sponsorship proposal be presented in the form of a letter. However, a short covering letter should be included with a sponsorship proposal.

• The reason for not writing your proposal in the form of a letter is essentially about readability. Your proposal will be long if it includes sufficient detail and long documents require the text to be broken up with headings and sub-headings. This is not an expected feature of a letter.

Rule #5 Your document presentation must be

professional

• Your proposal should avoid a mixture of different fonts, especially if they somewhat "arty". Headings should be 2 or 3 points larger than the paragraph text of the document. Your organization name and page numbers should appear in the footer, while the title of the document can appear in the header.

End of Presentation