Sponsorship Strategist

Nonprofit legal issues and sponsorship

The Nonprofit Quarterly published a well-written article by Mark D. Klimex and Jeremy J. Schirra about the legal considerations nonprofit organizations face when embarking on corporate sponsorship. Take a look, forward it to your legal counsel, and ask them good questions to make sure you're structuring your partnerships properly, minimizing exposure.

Why you need an iPhone 4s to sell sponsorship

If you're anything like me, you're crazy busy, juggling way too much, and find yourself downloading your brain onto your technology. (If you're not, how are you doing all this juggling? I'd really like to know!) If you haven't invested in the iPhone 4s yet, here's a huge reason why you might consider it.

Siri.

Yes, I know I'm a Johnny-come-lately with my review. Yes, I also know that sometimes Siri's responses are ridiculous if not maddening. But hear me out.

Because of Siri, voice-to-text functionality is woven into many standard and third-party apps on the newest iPhone. And it can make your life so much easier.

I missed the era of having a secretary to take or transcribe dictation. Fortunately when I came of professional age, women had way more options, and thanks to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, I've almost always had a computer at my desk or on my lap. This also means I've always done my own typing, and I'm pretty fast. But not as fast as I can speak.

Enter Siri. In Notes, Reminders, iMessage, and other apps, tap the microphone on the keyboard, speak what you need to have typed, and off Siri goes. Instant document.

Using Evernote, synced automatically in the cloud to my desktop and iPad, I have created rough drafts of documents that ordinarily take hours to craft in less than 30 minutes. If you do any writing in your career or life, you know that the first draft is usually the killer. Once you have something down on paper/screen, editing and revising and molding the final draft is much easier.

Here are a few ways how the iPhone 4s can support your sponsorship sales effort:

1. Relationship-building. When you leave a meeting with a client or prospect, sit in your car or on a nearby park bench and take 5 minutes to dictate your notes into Evernote, Simple Note, Notes, or whatever app you prefer. Impress your client and build your relationship with thoughtful follow-up that emerges from each discussion – because you have a record of it.
2. Responsiveness. Have Siri schedule Reminders so that you're timely, responsive, and client-focused with your next steps.
3. Proactive. Schedule your next appointment with iCal and have Siri send a confirmation email with an agenda to get your sponsor or prospect focused. You gain from conducting business professionally and buld trust by taking care of these details, guiding the relationship along.
4. Ideas. When you leave your client meeting, you're going to have more ideas. Siri can keep track of them for you, so that you don't forget them or have an accident trying to write them down or type them.
5. First draft. When it's time to write the proposal, dictate the first draft into Evernote or Notes. Create short sections at a time and always save. Also, make sure you're hitting the microphone and not the button to capitalize words, which I did a couple times, losing my brilliant sentence into the air. You'll save time and have your rough draft in minutes.

What about you? Have you found great apps and/or uses for Siri that you can share?

Sponsorship 2.0: Resources you should know about, Part 2

Earlier this week, I introduced you to Emily Taylor and SponsorPark.com, which she co-founded. Today, meet Kris Mathis and his creation, SponsorPitch.

Kris has more than 10 years of experience in sponsorship marketing both selling to, and representing, Fortune 500 brands. He started his career with Edelman in New York City, representing clients, such as 20th Century Fox, Johnson & Johnson, and Siemens. Prior to starting SponsorPitch, Kris served as International Product Manager for Paris-based mobile gaming startup, Gameloft, at the time named the fastest growing company in Europe by Business Week. Along the way, he has been featured in Advertising Age, Bloomberg TV, MarketWatch, and Sports Business Daily. 

SponsorshipStrategist: Why did you create SponsorPitch?

SponsorPitch was initially born in 2008 from a collection of my experiences buying sponsorships for an agency here in New York. After spending a few years in grad school, I started talking to some of the sponsorship people I knew about what resources they used and to my surprise/horror found that some amalgamation of CD-ROM’s, hardcopy sourcebooks and vastly overpriced contact lists were still the norm. It didn’t really seem right. Whereas most every other industry had seen a rapid transformation in efficiency between 2000-2010, the sponsorship powers that be really didn’t evolve much over that time for one reason or another. So I thought let’s try to create a resource in the cloud that shares sponsorship information and connects people in a targeted, time-sensitive and cost-efficient new way.

Our model has evolved over time, but the basic premise is as true today as it was when we started: better research and more targeted relationships lead to better ideas.

SponsorshipStrategist: Tell us about how SponsorPitch works.

After joining at sponsorpitch.com, you’re asked to create a basic profile about your experience in the industry. In creating a profile, you can list whether you are working with any brands (i.e. sponsorship buyers) or properties (sponsorship sellers) as well as any sponsorship deals that you’ve done in the past, your networking interests and contact information. This gives others in the SponsorPitch network an idea of your level of experience, which brands and properties you are either currently representing or have worked with in the past and how best to contact you.

Once you’ve created your profile, you can search properties and connect with their sales executives using Sponsor Pitch’s Property Index or search, filter, research and connect with sponsors using SponsorPitch’s Sponsor Index.

Since SponsorPitch is a network, our information is indexed coherently so you can see long-term patterns like new categories, spending trends and activation ideas taking root, but it’s updated in real-time so you get the information specific to your needs, as it happens, by following people, properties and sponsors that you’re interested in.

You can also browse through new jobs, follow the industry’s latest happenings on our blog and a few other things. From the CMO suite to your first internship, there really is something for everyone.

SponsorshipStrategist: What are the patterns you’re seeing now? Who is signed up already? What is the ratio of sponsorship buyers and sellers? Nonprofit and for-profit? And what kinds of properties do they represent?

SponsorPitch is used by sales professionals at most of the major sports leagues and many front office teams – agencies like IMG and Octagon; live music pros at places like Live Nation and AEG; the biggest theme parks in North America; municipal marketers and of course, many non-profits. Marketers from brands like UPS, Sony, GoDaddy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Sports Authority and many others use SponsorPitch, as well as ad agency professionals representing a whole host of other brands.

Earlier this month, we welcomed Major League Soccer to SponsorPitch. Through a new partnership with their league office here in New York, front office executives at all 19 MLS teams will have access to professional membership. You can read more about how they’ll be using SponsorPitch here.

And then there are some patterns that we never imagined when we re-launched earlier this year. For instance, while we knew the Sponsor Index would be a huge hit with sponsorship sellers, we didn’t think about how marketers would use it to keep track of the activity in their business category. For instance, the sponsorship manager at a major automobile company now has access to a real-time snapshot of what 40 other auto manufacturers are doing with less than three clicks using SponsorPitch’s Sponsor Index. Now replicate that across 1,500 other brands.

One of the earliest a-ha moments was when we saw how popular our blog and twitter feed were becoming back in 2009. I’d throw a few things up with the “#sponsorship” hashtag that I had read and found interesting. Then we’d come back the next day and be amazed at how many new people started following our updates and reading our blog. It kind of snowballed from there as we started to see that sponsorship professionals were starved for real-time information, for new leads, deeper connections – at a time when most of the big players in our industry were still trying to figure out what social media was. At the time, we didn’t have the website infrastructure to organize and customize all this information for them. Now we do.

SponsorshipStrategist: How do sellers use it?

SponsorPitch helps sponsorship properties accomplish in minutes, with the help of others, what used to take hours in isolation. Our research shows that sellers typically spend about two hours researching a brand prior to sending a proposal, and probably spend just as much time trying to determine which brands might be a good fit in the first place. Now imagine a place where a lot of that work is already done for you. Starting a sponsorship search from scratch is tough. Rather than seller’s recreating the secondary research of their peers throughout the world, they can come to SponsorPitch and in seconds see which brands are in over 300 business categories, who their competitors are, what they’ve sponsored, who makes sponsorship decisions within the company, how to submit a proposal, who within the network has worked with them in the past and more. From the seller’s perspective, that saves a lot of time and let’s you get to the point where your addressing business challenges for qualified leads that much faster.  Here’s an example of how professional members research at the speed of SponsorPitch.

Functionally, here are some of the things you can do with SponsorPitch: 

Sp seller deck

View more presentations from sponsorpitch

SponsorshipStrategist: How do buyers use it?

 SponsorPitch helps add valuable context to the hundreds, often thousands, of opportunities that brand marketers look at each year. With SponsorPitch, marketers can not only better understand the landscape of opportunities and what they offer to their brand, but also the demonstrated track record of who they’ll be working with in a sponsorship deal. The interactive nature of our network means that sponsors can go from research and discovery to real business solutions without all the inefficiencies that are typically associated with cold calls, sifting through proposals, pitch meetings and the like. From the buyer’s perspective, here is an example of how professional members research at the speed of SponsorPitch.

SponsorshipStrategist: Do you see SponsorPitch as the primary way people buy or sell sponsorship?

Yes, we believe that research and relationships are the two most essential ingredients to being successful in sponsorship, whether you’re buying, selling, activating, servicing, measuring or anything else. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.

That’s why a network is infinitely more powerful than a marketplace of cookie cutter proposals. At the end of the day, the best person to represent your brand or your property - is you.  

Our job is to give you the new relationships and the real-time data to make you shine.

SponsorshipStrategist: Tell us a success story of a cash-on-the-table deal that happened because of SponsorPitch.

We’ve been hearing success stories at all levels of the industry since we launched. Here’s one of the earliest examples, but you should realize that unlike a marketplace, deals are really just one aspect of the bigger story of what’s going on at SponsorPitch.

We’re not trying to automate transactions across the industry or create a crowded marketplace of aimless proposals. Sponsorship when done best is a collaborative exercise. You need the right information and often, the right connections to play the game. Once a year at a conference or once a week in a catch all industry report isn’t good enough anymore. What SponsorPitch is doing is putting useful information and the most valuable connections in the right hands so you can have the right conversations at the right time. This may mean an agency getting a new client or a seller finding a new partner. It could mean a brand manager impressing their CMO with a more thorough analysis of their category on command or a seller being able to recite a prospect’s existing deals in a chance meeting. For the first time, we have the social tools to assemble a network that can make, and help our users commercialize, these connections in real-time.

A marketplace of generic proposals simply can’t do that. 

SponsorshipStrategist: How does SponsorPitch differ from SponsorPark and the IEG Sponsorship Marketplace?

There is a human and social element to SponsorPitch.

That’s really the most striking one. Instead of looking at a marketplace of goods, SponsorPitch maps and aims to expand the lifeblood of the industry, it’s social connections, which are built on the information, trust, relationships and experience that our members bring into, and exchange, using our network. 

Networked research is really a fundamentally different approach than the industry’s old school pay to access a sourcebook or blow your research budget once a year to network at an annual conference. Our data is updated by our users daily and our network is essentially a 24/7 conference every day of the year. So we’re coming it this from a vastly different angle and approach.

The good news is our users are the real winners from this and you can get a feel for what they are saying and how they use SponsorPitch here.  Since our network is fueled by them, we can offer a real-time resource at a lower cost and with more flexible terms. That’s a pretty powerful combination, right? One example is rather than pay a big annual upfront fee as you would with other services, we have a monthly option that you can turn off at any time so you don’t get locked into something that you may not use.  

Obviously, there are some other differences. We’re a four person self-funded start-up. IEG is owned by a $15 billion company.

Everyone on our team, which has about 50 years of sponsorship experience between us, has taken on this mission because we care about what happens to the industry. Because we know how frustrating it is to try to get information about brand needs only to have a brand manager blow you off. Because we’ve been in the position of the brand manager or agency, where you’re buried in proposals and don’t have time to respond to twenty different cold calls. Because we think the exchange of more information creates better ideas, and outcomes, for both sides of the table. And that’s why we’ve been willing to work so hard to turn, with relatively few resources, an idea into a reality.

SponsorshipStrategist: What’s the greatest value SponsorPitch offers?

When you combine the right information with the right relationships, you position yourself to have the right conversations at the right time. You’re no longer just one of 3,000 sponsorship proposals that McDonald’s receives each year. You’re an answer to a problem. That’s the value of SponsorPitch.

SponsorshipStrategist: What are your aspirations for SponsorPitch?

Just the other day, I heard a story about a professional member in West Virginia, who represents an amazing property, but has little experience in sponsorship sales connecting with a sponsorship agency a couple hours away, also in West Virginia, that has over a decade of experience in sponsorship sales and strong connections throughout the industry. They exchanged messages through SponsorPitch and then took the conversation offline. In the old days, the same chance connection might come once a year at a $1,500 conference, a long ways away from West Virginia or through an annual sourcebook. Today, it happens less than a week after both members join a website.

Which is why an agency CEO up in Vancouver says, “It’s like making connections at a conference without the cost of a flight and hotel,” and why a sponsorship manager at a Fortune 50 company tells us that a SponsorPitch profile and a professional membership add to a salesperson’s credibility and separate them from the thousands of other proposals they receive each year.

My goal is to see these stories replicated again and again across the entire industry as the word spreads about what we’re doing.

SponsorshipStrategist: How much does it cost? It’s free to join and create a profile as it’s been since we launched in 2008. Our professional membership option is $35/month or $24/month if you pay for an entire year upfront. Professional membership allows you to search and filter about 1,500 of the most actively-spending sponsors by things like location, category and past spending patterns; get real-time updates about the sponsors, properties, and people you choose to follow, such as when new decision makers, sponsorship deals or community experts are added; access company descriptions, competitive snapshots, detailed spending history, decision maker contact information and insights from other users that have partnered with it in the past; tap into what we are told is one of the best jobs resources in the industry and several other things.

A few of our members recently came to us and said they found our jobs section useful, but weren’t currently employed, so we also added a special jobs plan at a discounted rate for them. 

SponsorshipStrategist: What else should Sponsorship Strategist readers know?

There’s a lot more in motion that we’re not ready to talk about yet. That’s just what we’ve done so far. Without all the professional SponsorPitch members that have gotten behind our vision, I can assure you that none of this would have been possible. 

 Please share: what are your experiences with SponsorPitch?

Sponsorship 2.0: Resources you should know about, Part 1

This week I'm profiling two sponsorship resources you should know about, SponsorPark and SponsorPitch.

Before blogs and social media, before the internet, before Kim Skildum-Reid and Anne-Marie Grey wrote their Toolkits for sponsorship seekers and for sponsors, and before IEG launched its newsletter, sponsorship buyers and sellers were like the One Hundred Monkeys, who each learned a better way to eat their sweet potatotes from friends and family. (Find the story here by scrolling to the bottom.) Finally at about the one hundredth monkey, consciousness shifted, and this new way to eat sweet potatoes took hold among all the monkeys in the tribe and among tribes on other islands. Same with sponsorship.

While everything has changed, nothing has changed. Sponsorship at its core remains the same powerful medium. But the sophistication, the complexity, the creativity, the professionalism, and the tools we use have evolved tremendously.And that, in part, is where SponsorPark and SponsorPitch come in.

You'll meet the two entrepreneurs behind these services in Q&A interviews, starting today with SponsorPark.

Meet Emily Taylor, co-founder of SponsorPark.com, a site designed to help connect sponsors with sponsorship opportunities. Emily has a background with Coca-Cola in account management and with Limited Brands in talent development. She currently resides in Omaha, NE with her husband and son. 

SponsorshipStrategist: Why did you create SponsorPark?

We created SponsorPark because we really saw a gap in the way brands and properties were connected.  Marketing decision makers were overwhelmed with sponsorship requests; most of which had no alignment with their marketing objectives.  We wanted to offer a solution to present targeted opportunities for their review. And for Properties, we saw an increasingly competitive sponsorship climate where they needed a solution to be the “squeaky wheel” with the most appropriate potential partners. Proactive, targeted, and “easy to use” were our goals for SponsorPark.

SponsorshipStrategist: Tell us about how SponsorPark works.

SponsorPark is meant to proactively generate quality exposure for sponsorship opportunities with potential sponsors. Each party goes through a process of communicating their interests/objectives, and according to these established filters, we are able to offer appropriate matches for review.  SponsorPark points sponsors in the direction of opportunities that are most likely to be a fit with their interests – customization of a partnership can be discussed after interest is established and connections are made. At this time, we offer full freedom to the seller and buyer to dialogue about interests, and we are not involved in the sale.

SponsorshipStrategist: How much does it cost?

Basic level is free. 

Premium month to month: $14.98 for first month, $29.95 every month thereafter. Premium annual is typically $299.95, currently half off for $149.98. 

Professional (typically used by agencies as they are given up to 10 upgrades with this account) month to month is $39.98 for first month, $79.98 every month thereafter.  Professional annual is typically $799.98, currently half off for $399.98.

SponsorshipStrategist: What are the patterns you’re seeing now? Who is signed up already? What is the ratio of sponsorship buyers and sellers? Nonprofit and for-profit? And what kinds of properties do they represent?

We’ve seen over 40,000 full proposal reviews (significantly more impressions) in the last 12 months, We’ve marketed our services to approximately 3,000 sponsors – the majority of communications (that we see) are directed toward upgraded proposals. There are about 11,000 properties registered with us and currently about 5,000 active proposals. SponsorPark caters to a wide range of property types. We have had properties as large as Madame Tussauds, American Heart Association, Reader’s Digest, and Chelsea Piers, NASCAR related proposals, The Erlick Group’s prestigious entertainment based properties, etc.  And properties as small as a local festival/fair (ex: Taste of Atlanta), shows and expos, theatre productions, etc. Both for-profit and nonprofit alike use SponsorPark.

SponsorshipStrategist: How do sellers use it?

For the properties/sellers, they can create an account with their own private back end to manage all listings/communications. Then create a proposal listing (which can be edited at any time to stay current) highlighting some of the most relevant pieces of their offering as an overview. (This is not to take the place of a custom proposal which will likely be requested upon interest from a potential sponsor.) This information (including target audience, description of assets, media/broadcast exposure, photos, price ranges, demographics, etc.) will be used to apply towards a filter, allowing their information to show up for the review of targeted sponsors. 

SponsorshipStrategist: How do buyers use it?

Sponsors/buyers can create a filtered search criteria at their discretion on the site themselves, and only the most appropriate listings will appear on a results page. This filtered search criteria can also be saved and results automatically sent directly to the sponsor for a more efficient solution.

Upon established “advanced interest” by the sponsor, we alert the seller, and both parties are able to connect and dialogue about next steps.

SponsorPark is a free solution for sponsors to proactively research possible partnership investments with the benefit of anonymity and targeting abilities.

SponsorshipStrategist: Do you see SponsorPark as the primary way people buy or sell sponsorship?

No.  It’s a complement to what a seller/buyer should already have in place.  It is one way to be proactive, generate more exposure and get a leg up in a competitive selling environment.  Nothing will ever replace a well-timed phone call and intentional networking, but without SponsorPark your reach is limited to one body, one voice, and a work day. With SponsorPark you are limited to the reach of the internet coupled with a targeted outreach. Buyers are never going to see the day when proposals aren’t on their desk awaiting their review – and some are very good; but doesn’t proactive, researched, targeted efforts sound much more effective and efficient? There’s much more to be done after reviews are made/connections are established. The buyers and sellers that use SponsorPark have the freedom to manage next steps without our involvement upon established interests. 

SponsorshipStrategist: Tell us a success story of a cash-on-the-table deal that happened because of SponsorPark.

One story from early on in our efforts was of a musician going on tour throughout the US who was discovered on SponsorPark by an agency who was (and is) using our resource to target potential partners for their clients.  The target audience, the tour’s demographic reach and the projected price was in alignment with filtered parameters.  Advanced interest was established after just 4 months of being listed on SponsorPark. The buyer entered into a dialogue with the artist and after a few weeks of negotiations an agreement was formed.  The specific dollar amount was not disclosed to us (as we were not part of the dialogue/sale), but it was enough to cover the tour as the primary sponsor. Marketing support was offered as well as in-kind support.  This partnership has turned into a long-term deal (currently active to the best of our knowledge).  

SponsorshipStrategist: How does SponsorPark differ from Sponsorpitch and the IEG Sponsorship Marketplace?

SponsorPark’s primary focus is on offering quality exposure and targeted opportunity research; we’re not a social platform like Sponsorpitch. SponsorPark promotes interaction as the result of alignment / synergy of interests. SponsorPark also offers a list of sponsorship related resources/service providers – similar to the IEG Marketplace (although it is free to post and anyone can review it) whereas Sponsorpitch offers profiles of sponsorship professionals. 

In comparison to the IEG’s Sponsorship Marketplace, the main differences are: pricing and the amount of information you’re able to post.  SponsorPark has one membership upgrade decision (either Premium or Professional), both marginally priced to allow all sizes of opportunities a more affordable option.  This allows the seller access to the full proposal listing and can communicate a tremendous amount of information as an overview. IEG’s marketplace offers an “a la carte” menu of items you can choose to include in your listing, each separately priced. 

SponsorshipStrategist: What’s the greatest value SponsorPark offers?

Targeted exposure for opportunities / quality research from sponsors.  We use the automated functionality of the site, the insights/suggestions from our team, social media, our blog and other resources to promote quality partnerships. We also pride ourselves in best practice education from our blog, networking on our social media groups and our resources page, and promoting industry awareness on our news section.

SponsorshipStrategist: What are your aspirations for SponsorPark?

We want SponsorPark to be the “go-to” online resource for buyers and sellers when they’re targeting potential new partners or sponsorship service providers. We want to continue growing our scope of services to the sponsorship community in order to make the sponsorship community more efficient, educated, and proactive.

SponsorshipStrategist: What else should Sponsorship Strategist readers know?

We offer a personal consultation to any new member who wants to learn more about our services from our team – we love learning about your efforts and helping you determine if SponsorPark is a good fit.  If interested, please don’t hesitate to reach out at: info@sponsorpark.com.  We’re also expanding our “resources” page – if you’d like to be listed as a sponsorship service provider, you can reach us at the same contact with your request to be considered.  Our presence is also growing on LinkedIn and Twitter, and we invite you to join us in these communities to further network and stay informed as to our growth and progress! 

To learn more you can reach Emily at: Emily.Taylor@SponsorPark.com.  And stayed tuned. On Thursday, you'll meet Kris Mathis, founder of SponsorPitch.

Till then, what has been your experience with SponsorPark?

 

[Full disclosure: Both sites occasionally republish my posts from SponsorshipStrategist.com; however, I have no financial interests in either site.]