Sponsorship Strategist

3 ways to improve your sponsorship value

One of the 8 drivers of sponsorship success is the quality of your sponsorship program. When was the last time you took a good hard look at what you’re selling? If your sponsorship program lacks value, you’re propping up a façade, which ultimately undermines your confidence. It’s a new year and time to review and upgrade. Read more →

What to consider when you consider sponsorship of a nonprofit organization

If your corporation is going to be strategic about its support of nonprofits — via philanthropy and through sponsorship investments — you have to be intentional about your partnerships, not just accept any opportunity that comes along. Corporations that only think sports when it comes to sponsorship (70 percent of all sponsorship dollars go to sports entities) are missing huge swaths of consumers. Plus they are competing with a lot of other sponsors. Plenty of excellent nonprofit organizations can be fantastic partners, and you’ll stand out from your competition. Here are the essential questions I recommend considering at three stages of your relationship with a nonprofit organization. Read more →

Are you a sponsorship opener or closer?

How’s your sponsorship sales follow through? Are you proactively taking the steps necessary, from beginning to end, to complete sales and move your prospects to the next step, with recovery time in between? Or fizzling out before this important step? Read more →

Sponsor logo clusters and other marketing problems

You know how some marathon t-shirts or nonprofit event emails or hard copy invitations have a big jumble of logos, most of which are so small you can’t even read them? Have you ever wondered whether this glob of logos is valuable? Read Gail Bower's response to Kivi Leroux Miller's "When Sponsor Promotion Consumes Your Communications Channels," who likens this display to a Times Square billboard. Read more →

Don’t sell green bananas.

I see lots of organizations selling green bananas. Unripened sponsorship programs that are undifferentiated, commoditized, and seller-focused. Read more →

Stop before you call

Have you ever instructed your staff member who has no sponsorship skills to go call some random company about sponsorship? You might be tossing your team into the sponsorship abyss. Read more →

Should your sponsor be your conference speaker?

Recently I’ve noticed lots of conferences, large and small, providing sponsors with the right to be a speaker. Here’s why this move can be problematic. Read more →

Corporate sponsorship and effective marketing for professional services firms

If professional services companies — law firms, accounting practices, marketing and ad agencies — are on your sponsorship prospect list, you’re going to have to use more persuasion to educate and acquire them. Recently, the presenters of a webinar aimed at professional services providers highlighted their research on the types of marketing tactics that these firms use. They also revealed which work and which don't. Read more →

What’s Your Mindset?

Developing your sponsorship fee strategy is no place for the faint of heart. Indeed, setting fees with an abundance mindset — by valuing what you truly have to offer — must be the mindset that prevails. That often means uprooting and dislodging mindsets based on lack. How's your mindset? Read more →

Don’t Fear a Sponsorship Apocalypse

If you follow news about corporate sponsorship, you might think we’re preparing for an apocalypse. Do a search and if there are stories about corporate sponsorship and certain areas of our culture — particularly municipalities, education, and parks, nature, and the environment — there will be handwringing, anxieties, and panic among the citizenry that the world is coming to an end. That world is black and white, on or off. No gray, no dimmer switch, no continuum. Fueling the anxieties are some reporters who imagine sponsorship in worst-case scenario terms. Take, for instance, a recent story in The Washington Post... Read more →