I get queries about this at least a couple of times a week, and while I’ve alluded to this subject in a number of blogs, I’ve never addressed it directly, so this blog is probably overdue.

Who to target

The first consideration is who you should target for your offer, and there are definitely roles you should avoid and roles that will be much more productive.

People you want to avoid…

Sponsorship manager – You’d think somebody called the “sponsorship manager” should be right person to receive your sponsorship proposal. That’s just what the company is hoping you’ll think, as one of the sponsorship manager’s biggest roles is that of gatekeeper – keeping you away from the real decision-makers. Yes, there are a few exceptions to this, but not enough to make this a good first entry into a company.

Online sponsorship submission forms – These are nothing but automated gatekeepers and don’t give you the scope to showcase what you really have to offer. Avoid them at all costs.

Agencies – It’s just not a good idea to volunteer to put a third party between you and the decision-maker. Stories of this working are rare, and I’ve never seen it happen myself.

CEO/MD/President – Please hear me when I tell you this: The CEO is not going to say “yes” to you. They aren’t going to say “no” to you, either. They’ll pass your proposal down the line until it gets to the sponsorship manager and then s/he’ll say “no”. Meanwhile, you’ve burned a ton of time.

People you want to seek out…

Brand manager (or a member of the brand team) – In most companies, this is who has the authority, flexibility, and budget to say “yes” to you, and is who you need to target. As a bonus, because so many sponsorship seekers are wasting their time with the CEO and the sponsorship manager, very few are targeting the brand manager.

General manager – This is often the right person to target in a smaller company, particularly a local or regional company. The good news is that you can call to confirm, as smaller companies tend to be less cagey about providing details to sponsorship seekers.

Regional marketing manager – If what you’re offering has a primarily local or regional focus, you could opt to approach the regional marketing manager. S/he may have the budget and authority locally, and can be a strong advocate in home office if your offer outstrips their budget.

Important

If you contact one of these people and are referred to the sponsorship manager, an agency, or an online form, you’re going to need to accept that you’ve probably just been told “no”. For more on that, you may want to read, “Six Signs a Sponsor is Just Not That Into You”.

Getting names and contact details

There are a lot of strategies for learning who to approach and how to contact her/him. How you go about it is a matter of the resources you have available and your own personal style. These are a few of the strategies you can use.

Use your network

Sponsorship isn’t anywhere near six degrees of separation. Chances are, you’ll only be a couple of degrees away from someone who can tell you who the actual decision-maker is and how to reach her/him.

Scan their media releases

Most corporate websites have a media centre, featuring their media releases from recent months or years. Find that page and scan for releases having to do with brand announcements. Chances are, there will be a quote from the brand manager in charge of that brand and voila, you have the name and correct title.

You should also note if there is an email address for the media contact, as the syntax will likely be the same for the brand manager (eg, firstname.lastname@company.com).

Search marketing publications

If you are selling a significant number and amount of sponsorships, you need to subscribe to your national advertising/marketing weekly – or at least their email alerts. Examples are AdAge, Adweek, AdNews, Media, and more around the world. Why? Because every time a new marketing initiative is announced for a major brand, it will be covered in one of those publications and will feature a quote from the brand manager in charge.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a good way to find out the correct name and title for the brand manager, as well as some background information that may assist you with preparing for a meeting or phone call. I’m not convinced, however, that LinkedIn messaging is a great way to introduce yourself. Ditto asking someone that you have never done business with to make a LinkedIn introduction. I get asked this all of the time, but if I don’t have personal experience working with you, sorry, but I’m not going to vouch.

Ask

If all else fails, call the switchboard and ask for the name of the [insert brand here] brand manager. Don’t then ask to be put through. You need to prepare before you make that call.

Directories

I am aware there are some directories available, but their value is really patchy. If it’s sponsorship-oriented, it’s the sponsorship manager (gatekeeper) that is usually listed. There are more general directories, listing brand managers. The biggest problem with directories, though, is that the turnover in marketing roles is high and the lists go out of date quickly. This is my least favourite option.

Now, don’t screw it up!

Once you’ve got the correct name, title, some background, and possibly an email address, you still have quite a lot to do before you’re ready to make contact. Don’t screw it up. Read the blogs, “The First Sponsor Meeting (and How Not to Make an Idiot of Yourself)” and “Don’t Send a Sponsorship Proposal until You Read This”.

Good luck!

I love LinkedIn. Most specifically, I love the Sponsorship Insights group on LinkedIn. It’s well-moderated, has little spam, a big membership, and the discussions are generally relevant and the responses mostly helpful.

I say “mostly” because there is a one-man phenomenon that is hell-bent on demonstrating the superiority of academics over people who actually work in this field. What he is actually demonstrating, however, is how arrogantly out-of-touch he is while he tries to bully people into his point of view.

The whole shebang started with an excellent question: “There is a growing need in our industry to demonstrate the impact and effectiveness of sponsorship campaigns… But, what is the most efficacious method of analysis? Comments?”

While industry professionals provided resources and advice relating to multi-faceted measurement against objectives, this academic was insisting that logo exposure was a primary contributor to marketing results, and belittling industry standards and anyone who supports them. He did cite research, but unless every research subject was somehow insulated so as not to have come in contact with any other leverage activities of any of those sponsors, there is no way to isolate causality. Honestly, though, is this even the right question? I mean, you could do a huge research project about whether people pay more or less attention to signage when it’s raining, but that would have about as much relevance to modern, sophisticated sponsorship as some of the research he’s citing.

In my world (and that of most industry professionals), we’d just prefer to measure the actual marketing results against existing benchmarks. Job done.

A quick look at his background and it all became clear… he is chairman of a logo-counting, sponsorship “measurement” company. Obviously. He waves the academic superiority flag, but is actually trying to build credibility for methodology that’s 15-20 years out of date.

The most recent stoush started when a (different) university lecturer asked a very reasonable question about whether he needed to use a textbook or whether there were enough slideshows and other content available online to do the job.

My opinion? As someone who has created a LOT of freely available content on the subject, I think it’s very possible to string together the references you need from a wide variety of credible web resources, although sifting through the options and getting them in some semblance of order may not be easy. The bigger downside is that the resulting references may not be cohesive or provide the kind of linear, Point A to Point B how-to that an absolute beginner will probably need.

I recommended The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3^rd Edition, as it is used by many dozens of academic programs. Several other people also recommended it (thank you!). Other people suggested some books from IEG and Pippa Collett & William Fenton’s work, The Sponsorship Handbook. All of these are viable options and worth consideration, and all of them were written by working industry professionals.

Cue rant.

His advice was that books by sponsorship consultants was that they “might be fun to read” but “lack quality control”. Hmm… and here I thought that asking fellow sponsorship professionals for their recommendations and… you know… actually reading them and checking them out to ensure they align with your teaching approach, was about the best quality control you could get. He also mentioned he hasn’t read those “fun” books. Good to hear he knows what he’s talking about, then.

From there, it devolved into all the reasons why academia knows sponsorship better than working sponsorship professionals, with the sponsorship pros involved responding with a collective, “are you kidding me?!” There were also several references to his experience as brand manager for a major multinational, giving him industry insight and credibility. He fails to mention that ended in 1972.

His coup de gras? He claims, “The sponsorship area has a long way to go to be understood.” By him, it certainly does.

The most interesting and salient thing about all of this is that most university programs on sponsorship, event management, sports marketing, and related subjects, are taught by lecturers whose day jobs are… wait for it… consultants who are actually working in the field! The few “pure” academics I know in the field work closely with industry professionals, to ensure what they are teaching is relevant, timely, and actually prepares students for the reality of working in this complex and sophisticated field.

The bigger issue is, of course, that he has students who probably think they’re being prepared to work in this industry. With a bit of luck, the many, many sophisticated sponsorship professionals across Scandinavia will ensure that the real-world education those students may lack coming out of university is more than offset by the mentoring they get as they start their careers.

While all of this started out as entertaining, it’s now actually making that group a less pleasant place to interact. From here on in, rather than avoiding the group, I’ll be pressing “pause” on my idealism and ignoring the guy – which is probably what I should have done from the start. Being less of an idealist would save me a lot of headaches… but that is who I am.

I’ve written blog after blog after article after book about the collaborative nature of sponsorship; how it requires both broad buy-in and a commitment to leverage from a range of stakeholders; and that brand managers are generally the ones who approve sponsorship spend.

So, if sponsorship decisions and leverage are being spread across various decision-makers, do we still need sponsorship managers? To that, I answer an emphatic “yes”. They fill a number of critical roles to doing sponsorship truly well.

Gatekeeper

Let’s face it. Being a gatekeeper is a big part of most sponsorship managers’ jobs – somebody has to sift through the hundreds or thousands of proposals your company receives every month. The thing is, most sponsorship managers either spend too much or too little time in this role.

Sometimes the gatekeeping workload alone accounts for the lion’s share of a sponsorship manager’s time. I’m all for diligence, but if the number of proposals received is untenable, and most of them are completely inappropriate, they’re not worth putting in the effort to fully review.

My very strong recommendation is that all sponsors should have a tight set of sponsorship guidelines and make them very clearly available (ie, don’t bury them 17 levels into your website). If you don’t have guidelines and need a big running start, you can download a sponsorship guidelines template.

This will improve the proposals you get, and will stop a lot of sponsorship seekers from submitting proposals that are clearly not a match. It will also trip up sponsorship seekers who aren’t interested in putting in the effort to meet your needs. There is another step, though. For all of those proposals and letters of request received – where it’s clear by the second page that they haven’t been prepared according to the guidelines or are completely wrong for the brand – sponsorship managers need to stop reading right there and send them an email something like this:

Hello [Sponsorship Seeker] –

We have received your sponsorship proposal. It is clear that this has not been prepared according to our sponsorship guidelines, and as such, we will not be reviewing your offer.

If you want your offer to be considered, you need to review and follow our guidelines.  They can be downloaded from this link: www.fakesponsor.com/guidelines.

Once you have thoroughly reviewed the guidelines, if you still believe you can meet our requirements, we encourage you to resubmit a more appropriate proposal that is customised to our needs.

Sincerely, [The Sponsor]

Then, there are the sponsorship managers who don’t spend enough time interacting with potential partners, opting instead for a war of attrition, waged with unanswered voicemails, unread emails, and unopened proposals. Sometime sponsorship managers get overwhelmed. Sometimes it’s a workload issue. Sometimes, frankly, it’s a power trip. Whatever the reason, it’s not a good idea.

If a sponsorship manager is diligent about using sponsorship guidelines, the number of proposals that are contenders for consideration will reduce significantly. Those sponsorship seekers need some attention, and probably more insight into brand and target market needs, so that the offers can be fine-tuned and opportunities explored.

Relationship manager

Another big (and time-consuming) part of the job is managing relationships with partners. This is not just about ensuring that a sponsee delivers the contracted benefits – although that’s part of it. It’s about being a partner – working together to ensure the objectives of both parties are being achieved. Got that? Both parties. The sponsorship manager should be seeking to understand the needs of the partners and add value to the relationship, just as s/he should be expecting understanding and added value from the sponsee.

Internal consultant

In addition to being a gatekeeper and managing relationships, a big part of a modern sponsorship manager’s job is being an internal consultant. In my eyes, this is easily the most important part of the job.

Realistically, all of those other stakeholders have other jobs. They are specialists in their own areas, and while they may have a good, working knowledge of sponsorship, it is usually a minor portion of what they do. Taken together, these stakeholders will do the lion’s share of the work around a sponsorship, but it all needs to be marshalled and directed and the process needs some leadership. That’s where a sponsorship manager comes in, taking on tasks such as:

• Coordinating stakeholder needs, so negotiations will net the most appropriate benefits.
• Managing the leverage planning process.
• Ensuring all negotiations and leverage are aligned with business and target market needs and reflect best practice sponsorship. (What is that? Read “Last Generation Sponsorship”.)
• Managing renewals, mid-term negotiations, and sponsorship reviews.
• Managing the sponsorship strategy development and portfolio audit process.

If your sponsorship manager has potential, but isn’t quite at this level, one option is to get him/her some training. Another option is to bring in a coach, who will both train and support the sponsorship manager through the transition to a higher functioning role. (If you want to discuss either of these, drop me a line.)

Information collator

As part of the internal consultant role, there is also the role of information collator. That is particularly important when it comes to measurement.

I’m not saying it is the sponsorship manager’s job to measure sponsorship results, because it’s not. Changes in target market behaviour should be measured by the internal experts across your company, in the ways that your company accepts, and against existing, accepted benchmarks. Changes in target market perceptions should be measured with research, using a selection of the same questions you are asking in ongoing (or at least recent) target market research.

What is the sponsorship manager’s job? Marshalling the process and collating the information into a report that can be distributed across stakeholders and up the line.

Up-skiller

Doing sponsorship really well does require some organisational understanding of how it works and the principles of best practice. The role of ensuring that key people from around the company have the skills and tools to get it right, and make the process as streamlined as possible, will usually fall to the sponsorship manager. This could be about bringing in some training or creating a handbook or distributing case studies, but however it’s done, it’s about elevating the approach.

In addition to skilling up your company’s team, many sponsorship managers spearhead training for partners, understanding that a more sophisticated partner will be easier to work with and you should get a much better result.

The upshot

The upshot is that a sponsorship manager is much more than the administrator that many companies define them as. A sponsorship manager should be the lynchpin to great sponsorship results, not the lackie trying to make something out of nothing with virtually no integration.

It is important to have the right person in the job (or as the head of a sponsorship team). That person must have exceptional sponsorship skills, with enough experience, authority, and charisma to lead a team of cross-departmental stakeholders, without being their boss. That person must either have an balanced analytical/creative mind, or be able to develop and lead a team with that balance. That person must have a strong, working understanding of every other marketing media, as sponsorship needs to be integrated across all of it.

And if the right person is in the job, there is every chance that person will end up Chief Marketing Officer someday.

There was a recent social media stir about an over-the-top rejection letter sent to 900 candidates for a job in the IT industry. Thousands of people complained about the tone and wordiness, and there was a great deal of how-dare-they attitude on display. To an extent, I agree. The tone was condescending and it was way too long and self-important. But the people complaining seemed to be missing the point inherent in the writer’s frustration: If there are 900 applicants for only a handful of jobs, being careless or wacky or not following instructions is not going to get you one of them.

What does this have to do with sponsorship? A lot.

Some sponsors receive hundreds of sponsorship proposals for every one that they actually consider. Most of them aren’t good matches for their needs, but a lot of them could have some scope, if they were presented in a way that showcased the real opportunity for the sponsor.

So, on behalf of frustrated sponsors everywhere, the rejection letter they wish they could send:

Dear [Sponsorship Seeker] –

While we wish we could thank you for the submission of your sponsorship proposal, that would be a lie, as the proposal you sent has wasted both your time and ours.

Despite the fact that we have posted comprehensive sponsorship guidelines on our website, you have either not reviewed them, or you have reviewed them and decided it wasn’t worth your while to develop a customised offer that meets those criteria. Either way, that lack of effort speaks volumes about your organisation’s sophistication and responsiveness.

Please understand that we receive hundreds of sponsorship proposals every month. We simply don’t have time to sift through all the pages of meaningless, self-involved hoo-ha about your property to find any scrap of relevance to our brand and our markets. If you want our money, the proposal needs to be about meeting our objectives with our target markets.

The opportunity you’ve presented may have had real value for our brand – it may have been a candidate for consideration – but the lack of care and professionalism in your presentation means that we will never know.

We have a lot of choice. It’s a buyer’s market. If you want your offer to be considered, you need to put in the research and effort up front, or you simple won’t be successful.

Sincerely, The Sponsor

Too blunt? Maybe. A little sharp? Probably. But is it what some sponsorship seekers really need to hear? Absolutely. And it beats the other response that sponsors really want to send:

Dear Sponsorship Seeker –

Are you bloody kidding me?!

Sincerely, The Sponsor

 And for those of you sponsors who don’t have sponsorship guidelines, you really need a set. The number of proposals you receive will drop and the quality of the ones you do get will rise. For a big running start, you can download my Sponsorship Guidelines Template.

Back in 2010, soccer fans were gripped with anticipation over the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Also in that year, Valentine’s Day happened to fall on a match day. Puma seized on that to create a viral campaign that captured both the passion and the imagination of soccer fans.

The Puma Hardchorus was born, and fans could dedicate a love song, sung by what appear to be surprisingly talented soccer fans, and send it to their loved ones or share it with them on social media – demonstrating their love while still going to the game.

The most famous was this English one, with soccer fans singing the super-romantic “Truly, Madly, Deeply”, but they also created one in Italy using the song “Ti Amo” (“I love you”), and one in Korea around their national Children’s Day. (They all rock, but I’d back the English supporters in a fight.)

You could argue that this wasn’t really an ambush, but the way the soccer angle is used and the graphic depiction of Africa with the Puma logo is clearly aligning the brand with the anticipation of soccer fans, while staying well clear of doing anything illegal. FIFA sponsor, Adidas, probably would have seen that differently.

The reason I’m writing about this is because, in the lead-up to the London Olympics, while LOCOG is rattling their swords and taking IP enforcement to the point of curtailing free speech among genuinely enthusiastic fans, any non-sponsor could mount an ambush strategy simply by thinking laterally, reflecting the passion of the fans better than the corresponding sponsor, and not diluting a great idea, which is exactly what Puma did with this campaign. And there wouldn’t be a damned thing LOCOG could do about it.

By the same token, if the rightful Olympic sponsors could take their focus off the Games themselves for a few minutes and have a good look at the larger experience – if they could recognise and value the fans, rather running the same “enter to win tickets” competition run by all the other sponsors – they could do interesting, effective activities like this. And if they did, their leverage program would be much more effective, while making ambush by a competitor nigh on impossible.

If you’d like to speak with me about ambush marketing – doing it or stopping it happening to you – by all means, drop me a line:

kim@powersponsorship.com
AU: +61 2 9559 6444
US: +1 612 326 5265

I did a keynote this past week in Toronto. The session before mine was a panel discussion featuring three big players in Canadian professional sports. (Brian Burke, of the Maple Leafs, is hilarious, by the way.)

One of the questions was about whether they thought it was okay to put sponsor branding on sports uniforms. Across the board – or should I say “uniformly” (ha!) – they dismissed the very idea as unacceptable and tantamount to selling out.

I couldn’t help but think, oh really… that’s selling out? Putting logos on uniforms would be a travesty, but electronic signage alongside the field that makes it harder to watch the game isn’t? Selling sleeve sponsorship is wrong, but granting sponsors benefits that annoy and intrude on the fans’ experience is okay? Putting a brand across a player’s chest is selling out, but allowing sponsors to crowd the televised coverage with the pointless statistics brigade isn’t? I saw a game not too far back that had no fewer than three branded stats – all meaningless – on screen at the same time, taking up about a third of my television. Thanks a bloody lot.

I’m a sports fan. Most of us are fans – if not of sports, then of culture or something else – but somehow we forget that when it comes to business. Our industry routinely sells out fans, when it is not only unnecessary, but counter-productive. There are so many ways a sponsor can add value to the experience, not disrespect it. For more on that, read my white paper, “Last Generation Sponsorship”.

Back to logos on uniforms…

If you have ever read anything in the blog or my books, you will know that I’m not proponent of logo exposure as an objective for sponsorship. You will never hear me say that a logo on a jersey is going to accomplish much for a sponsor, because it won’t. But taking a cue from the field of medicine, first, do no harm. And while a logo on a uniform isn’t going to achieve brand goals, it also doesn’t harm the fan experience. In North America, as with the rest of the world already, fans will tune it out, and it will just be one more bit of wallpaper.

So, I’m okay with it. If the league gives its blessing and a team can generate some good revenue for a jersey sponsorship, then go ahead and do it. But teams owe it to sponsors – even misguided ones – to ensure they do something meaningful with it. Paying the big bucks for a jersey sponsorship makes no sense at all if the sponsor then winds the clock back twenty years and starts counting media impressions, rather than leveraging real results against marketing objectives.

In a perfect world, logos wouldn’t play a big part in sponsorship’s perceived value and sponsorship seekers would never sell their fans out to sponsors, but until we get there, I believe logos on jerseys is by far the lesser of the evils.

Australia has been my home for nearly twenty years, but I grew up in Minnesota. With that comes the burden of being a Vikings fan, so it is with interest that I’ve been following the will-they-won’t-they-and-where coverage of whether they will get a new stadium to replace the much-maligned Metrodome.

The other day, I read this article by Thomas Lee of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In it, he makes a few interesting points, and some of them are way off base. He certainly isn’t alone, however, and has merely fallen into the same old-school analysis of stadium naming rights that media and our industry has for years. So, I’m going to take on a couple of those assertions.

Stadium naming rights equates to “giving back to the community”

Naming rights is a lot of things, but it is not altruistic.

Let’s think about this for a second. If naming rights costs, let’s say, $150 million over 20 years, is sponsoring the stadium really better for the community than investing $150 million in local cause and community sponsorship over that period? Of course not. That’s just ridiculous.

There is the argument that if a sponsor enables a stadium to be built that will keep the team in town, that it will be good for the community. When it comes down to it, though, that revenue is likely to be a drop in the bucket. If the stadium costs half a billion to a billion dollars to build, not to mention the costs of finance, $7 or $10 million a year (or whatever) is hardly going to be a deciding factor.

In the case of the Vikings, apparently, the team will get to keep all naming rights revenues, not the bodies who are underwriting the development of the stadium. What that says to me is that, even if you could connect stadium naming rights to building the stadium that will keep the team from moving, that angle doesn’t seem to be applicable here.

A football stadium is more valuable than a baseball or basketball stadium

I’m not buying this at all. If a sponsor is prepared to use a sponsorship of this size effectively, they want as many touchpoints with fans as possible. The NFL delivers far fewer home games in a season than other major sports, so a dedicated football stadium has very limited windows for leveraging the experience. Contrast that with other stadiums, which not only host more home games, but usually also host a large complement of concerts and other events.

I’m not saying that there is no value in football stadium sponsorship – not at all – I just want to debunk the apparent belief that there is more significantly more value in an investment with a fraction of the touchpoints that other stadiums have.

The upshot from all of this is that I wish sponsors, media, teams, and the like would stop trying to paint stadium sponsorship as something it’s not and just call it what it is:

• For companies who are prepared to really work the investment to achieve overall, measurable marketing objectives, it can be a shrewd marketing investment.
• For companies trying to establish or maintain financial credibility, it might increase market capitalisation. (There have been studies linking stadium naming right to a market cap increase of up to 1.65%. Then again, there have been studies saying there is only negligible, if any, effect.)
• For companies who aren’t prepared to use the investment effectively, and are content to congratulate themselves for “owning” a stadium, it’s just about the best corporate ego trip that can be had.

The unfortunate truth is that few stadium sponsors fall into the first category and most approach it with some combination of the second and third categories. The result is millions… no, billions… of wasted marketing money.

I’m delighted to be keynoting at the 2012 SMCC Conference & Awards in Toronto on 3 April. My topic is:

Cleverage: The Game Outside the Game

• Adjusting your focal point: Finding the big opportunities you’re probably missing now
• Why great sponsorships are driven by clarity, generosity and fearlessness
• How creativity and buy-in are much more important to your results than money
• Thinking like an ambusher

For details on the whole conference program and how to register, see the Sponsorship Marketing Council of Canada’s Conference page.

If you’re there, by all means, say hello. You can’t miss me. I’m about nine feet tall with hair that looks like it was done with a Cuisinart. If you can’t find me, ask somebody from CINCO, as I am working closely with them.

In the past, I’ve tackled a lot of aspects of negotiation, but I haven’t really blogged about the basics of the whole negotiation process before. It’s probably about time.

Many of us grew up during a time when negotiation was seen as largely a win-lose prospect. It was adversarial, with the ultimate goal to get as much as you can for as little as you can, without thought for the other side. In many circumstances, we still see negotiation that way. We’re not going to offer more for a house that we have to, just because we know the seller is under financial duress. No, we’ll offer even less, hoping for the bargain of a lifetime. We don’t care about being equitable or playing nice when we buy cars.

While I’m not a person to advocate being an adversarial jerk when you negotiate for anything, in sponsorship it is a particularly bad idea. Why? Because unlike buying a house or a car, after you’ve done the sponsorship deal, you still have to work with that partner to make the sponsorship happen. Is that really how you want to start a relationship that could well span years? No, you really don’t, because a sponsor’s ultimate goal is to get the best possible result for the brand, and the sponsee’s ultimate goal is to have a sponsor that adds value to the marketing plan, advocates sponsorship of their properties to others, and renews, and neither of those thing can be achieved without the cooperation and support of your partner.

So, here are a few tips for sponsorship negotiation. They are all pertinent to both sides, although the application may be different.

Target markets come first

The most important party to the negotiation is the target markets, but they are the only party not at the table. Why are they the most important? A sponsor is trying to connect with them and nurture their relationship and relevance to them. And for sponsorship seekers, this is the audience and potential audience for the property. If either side does the wrong thing by those target markets, everyone will lose. Aim for win-win-win… always.

Sponsorship seekers: Never, ever offer or agree to sponsorship benefits that will make your property less pleasant, less relevant, or otherwise diminish the experience. Your target markets will see you as a sell out and your reputation will suffer.

Sponsors: Your absolute best strategy for getting a return is to add value to that experience. If you use money or a sponsee’s desperation to negotiate benefits that you will use to diminish the target markets’ experience, you are doing the exact opposite of best practice. If you have to, put yourself into the audience’s position and ask, “if I’m there to see the band/game/festival/exhibition, does this add to or detract from the experience?”

Keep it in your pants

Many perfectly reasonable people lose their minds when it comes to negotiations, and take every chance they have to come out on top. Some sponzillas ask the world for a pittance, demand unrealistic changes to events, and treat sponsorship seekers like peons, not peers. Then, there are sponsorship seekers who threaten to go to the competition, create unrealistic urgency, or start moving a sponsorship forward without agreement – all insidious forms of bullying.

There are times when all reason goes right out the window, and the whole thing stops being about a sponsorship and starts being a competition. If either of you think there is any chance that’s happening, you need to call a halt to it, and state categorically that you won’t be a party to any negotiation like that. It’s just not worth it.

Be open-minded

Sponsorship requires a lot of analysis, on both parts. But when it comes right down to it, negotiation is often a very creative process. If the basic building blocks of a good sponsorship are there, let that creative process flow.

Sponsors: Don’t think it’s the benefits on offer or nothing. If the property is relevant to your target market, and you have enough time to leverage it, you may be able to negotiate benefits that will make it work for you.

Sponsorship seekers: You have a lot of benefits you could offer – probably a lot more than you think. If it starts to go pear-shaped in a negotiation, stop and reassess what the sponsor is trying to accomplish. Chances are you have options that will help them achieve their goals. Download the Generic Inventory template for a huge running start on what you can offer.

Be generous

Stinginess benefits no one. In a negotiation, if you can provide something that will help your potential partner achieve a goal – and there’s no downside to you – just do it.

Sponsors: Ask your potential partner what their biggest marketing, or even operational, challenges are. You may be able to provide access to markets, expertise, infrastructure, or a wide range of other benefits.

Sponsorship seekers: If a benefit is easy to provide, and providing it wouldn’t devalue your other sponsorships, go ahead and do it. For instance, providing access to intellectual property – or allowing a sponsor access to create their own content – is among the easiest and most valuable things you can provide.

Consider contra

Following on from being generous, both sides should consider contra/in-kind as an option. It can allow sponsors to get more benefits for a lower cash outlay, while sponsorship seekers get a higher overall investment than they would have.

I have a range of recommendations in another blog, entitled Valuing Contra vs Cash Sponsorship. Do read it, as valuing it correctly is key to opening up this payment option.

Be realistic

Sponsorship negotiation isn’t really that difficult, but being realistic is important. This includes being realistic about both the price and the lead-time.

Sponsors: You need to respect that sponsorship is a big revenue stream for many sponsorship seekers, and you shouldn’t screw a potential partner down from a realistic price, just because you can. You also need to be up-front to the sponsorship seeker about lead time. If you don’t have enough time to make a decision, plan, and implement a leverage program, don’t waste their time.

Sponsorship seekers: If the sponsorship is wildly overpriced, compared to the market, it doesn’t matter how relevant or creative the benefits offered, it’s not going to happen. You also need to ask the hard questions about lead-time, because again, you could make the best offer in the world, if they can’t leverage the opportunity, it’s worth nothing to them. For more on the critical importance of sponsorship lead-time, read Sponsorship Lie #212: There’s Still Time.

In recent months, several people have asked when I’m doing my next pro bono training program for charities. The answer is, I’m not… at least not anytime in the foreseeable future.

Over the years, I’ve done a half-dozen or so really big sponsorship training programs for charitable organisations. Unfortunately, my experience with doing them has been less than satisfying. It’s also been enlightening, as the very thing that was causing me so much frustration is why those same organisations struggle to get (or keep) sponsorship: Entitlement.

A few years ago, I did the 100 Charities Project. I offered two people from each of 100 charities in Australia and New Zealand the opportunity to attend a two-day, nearly $2000 per organisation workshop for about $300. The terms were, they had to have two people registered, at least one of them had to be a decision-maker, and both people had to be there for all of both days. Basically, I wasn’t going to invest my time, travel to five cities, and make a huge loss on a training program if they couldn’t be bothered to make the most of it.

I had several organisations register two people, but send only one. I had people tell me on the day that they wouldn’t be there that afternoon or the next day, because they had a meeting or something happening at work. In every case, I told them that if they didn’t meet the terms, they wouldn’t be able to stay. People demanded their whopping investment of $300 back (but didn’t get it) and I got abused for expecting charitable organisations to actually abide by the terms.

In 2010, I reprised my very successful Sponsorship School on a global scale, using technology for training and coaching sessions. Almost 100 organisations applied, and about 10% of them were selected. Those who were selected got six private webinars, six months of on-demand coaching with me, and a lot of other benefits. Two of the organisations completed the whole program. Two attended all of the webinars and had a couple of coaching sessions. The rest attended the webinars and didn’t interact at all aside from that. Almost $20k each in value on offer, and they used about $700 of it.

When I contacted them to see why they weren’t using the opportunity they had, and were wasting a place in the program that could have been used by someone else, every one of them copped an attitude like how dare I expect them to meet their obligations or act in a businesslike manner. Didn’t I know they’re a charity?? They’re very busy and plus, I should be providing these resources for free.

To be fair, the vast majority of charities I’ve dealt with over the years have been very professional and a real delight. But the few with entitlement issues – the ones copping the non-profit version of “don’t you know who I am?” – have been enough to scare me off doing another pro bono project for a good, long time.

Which brings me to sponsors…

I work primarily for corporate sponsors. I assist them with strategy, audits, and negotiations, among other things, so I am privy to a lot of discussions about their relationships with sponsees. Virtually every one of my corporate clients has been burnt multiple times by charitable and community organisations, who sell them a marketing opportunity, then don’t deliver or service well. They’ve all had charity sponsees who continually go back to the sponsor for more, or who have threatened to go to the media or to the CEO, if they don’t get the renewal. They’ve all invested marketing money, then been taken for granted, as if it had been provided with no strings attached.

Yes, sometimes these things happen because the organisation really doesn’t understand their role, which is fixable with education. But it becomes really galling when, upon the issues being addressed, the response is a slightly more polite form of, “you didn’t really expect something for your money, did you? I mean, we’re a charity. You should be giving us the money!”

Again, this happens in the small minority of charitable and community sponsorships, but every time it happens to a sponsor, they become more wary of investing in that sector. And if they do invest in that sector, what I’m seeing is a tendency to prefer the bigger, more commercial organisations. The presumption is that those bigger organisations understand they’re in a marketing partnership and will deliver on their promises, whereas smaller organisations are less likely to get it. The upshot is that those few bad apples are making it much more difficult for the legions of astute, responsive, commercially-minded charitable and community organisations – and particularly the mid- and smaller-sized ones.

I can tell you that if I could be guaranteed participants that would take full advantage of the opportunity, I would roll out one pro bono program after another. And if every charity organisation treated sponsors like commercial partners, not donors, the entire sector would be more successful. There are huge opportunities for sponsors to get a commercial return – change people’s perceptions and behaviours – through charitable and community sponsorship of organisations big and small.  But nobody likes being taken for granted – not you, not me, and not sponsors.

The situation reminds me of an adage about how it takes ten compliments to undo one criticism. I don’t know how many good experiences a sponsor has to have with the sector to undo each bad one, but I can tell you we’re not there yet. Maybe it’s education to reduce the number of those bad apples. Maybe it’s the sector committing to raise their game to a level where the bad apples seem more like freakish anomalies, and less like a sector-wide risk. I don’t know.

So, what do we do about this? How do we, as Francis Bacon put it, “hang a question mark on the things some have long taken for granted”?

I’m going to throw it open to you for suggestions. I am also happy to volunteer my services to a fundraising association (or similar) who wants to work with me to develop a plan specifically to elevate the sector and reduce the incidence and impact of this counterproductive approach, and put the initiative on project status.

I’m throwing down the gauntlet. I guess I still am an idealist, after all. Comments are open.