Best Practice Sponsorship
If you fundraise for a For-Purpose, For-Passion and For-Social Change organisation, then you will also be looking for effective ways to diversify your revenue streams. Long-term and reliable funding for your programs, services and events are vital to ensure that you can continue to serve and advocate for your community of followers.
The pathway to best practice sponsorship has revolutionised the way countless organisations have created meaningful, accountable partnerships with corporate sponsors that have had significant financial and social benefits for everyone involved. And now we want it to help you!
This pathway is a groundbreaking four-step process that takes fundraisers through the phases of the corporate partnerships lifecycle. It has been designed to help organisations most of their limited time, budget and resources to diversify their income streams and maximise their impact.
Whether your organisation is looking for a fresh perspective on sponsorship or you’re brand new to it, successfully planning, finding, connecting with and keeping committed corporate partners is the golden standard in sponsorship for the For-Purpose sector.
The four phases in the pathway to best practice sponsorship are:
Plan
The importance of preparing for sponsorship success is often the most underestimated (or by-passed altogether) stage of creating a sponsorship strategy.
When you decide that your For-Purpose organisation or event is ready to engage sponsors, the process can be greatly streamlined by putting a plan into action that ensures you have everything in place in your sponsorship-seeking arsenal by the time you make your approach to a company or brand. After all, if you haven’t created a solid plan and a sponsor rejects your approach, you won’t be able to go back to them again and ask for another bite of the cherry.
Your plan should focus on maximising internal capacity and support by ensuring the organisational processes, procedures, culture and team you have in place are robust and setting you up for success on all levels. Part of this planning phase includes creating a culture of ‘commercial acceptance’ that promotes whole-of-organisation buy-in and commitment to support your sponsorship-seeking efforts.
Organisations and events that enjoy great corporate support are the ones that know why their supporters are a potential target market to a corporate partner and what communication channels they can offer to leverage the ideal partnership. By taking the time to create a clear plan, you are ensuring that your organisation is in the best position to approach the right partners and fully support the sponsorship strategy you are seeking to implement.
Planning is about ‘internal capacity building’ – ensuring that the organisational processes, procedures, culture and team support you have in place are robust and setting you up for sponsorship success.
Find
Finding the companies and brands that are the ‘right fit’ to partner with your organisation or event is a vital part of the sponsorship seeking journey. Unfortunately, this is where most For-Purpose sponsorship seekers choose to start their journey. The high priority need for new and greater sources of income to fund programs and service members drives many organisations to arbitrarily approach any company who might be willing to provide them with money without fully understanding just how successful they could be if they had a clear plan of attack.
The challenge is, by commencing your sponsorship seeking efforts in this phase it means that you have missed vital steps in the process (like forgetting to create the foundation of your new house before putting the walls in) and so the likelihood of long-term success is drastically minimised. Unless you know what you have to offer, are supported internally and have policies in place that define how your organisation sees corporate partnerships, then you are potentially building your house on sand… and we all know how that turns out.
Finding the companies and brands that are willing to align with your organisation is not just about asking ‘who are we going to approach?’ This part of the process means taking the time to value your offering to potential sponsors, do your research to ensure a strong alignment, build relationships with potential partners and craft a compelling proposal.
Take the time to value your offering to potential sponsors, do your research to ensure a strong alignment, build relationships carefully with potential partners and craft a compelling proposal.
Connect
Connecting with corporate partners who are aligned with your mission and see you as a thought leader in your field, as well as a direct route to their target market is a milestone worth celebrating!
Understandably, many For-Purpose organisations get to this stage of the process with feelings elation, knowing that this investment will benefit their supporters, research projects and the future of their mission. This natural excitement can all too often lead many organisations to then take their focus back to their ‘core work’ and new sponsors and fresh promises of access are left forgotten, leading to difficult conversations, uncomfortable relationships and no chance of renewal or investment for the following year.
This phase of the pathway to best practice sponsorship means securing that connection. Ensuring you have the right tools and processes in place to make it as easy as possible for a partner to stay with you and enjoy the experience of becoming part of your ‘community’s family’.
If you want to connect with corporate partners, ensure you do it properly; secure the partnership with a legally binding contract and publicly announce the partnership, ensuring that you are both ‘singing from the rooftops’ about the great work you will do together.
There will inevitably be times when difficult conversations with sponsors may arise but having strategies to manage this discourse as well as tactics to deal with difficult sponsors and personalities will ensure that you are not caught off guard and potentially exit a relationship that may just need some nurturing.
Lastly, and most importantly, measuring the investment for your sponsor and reporting regularly on what is your responsibility to deliver as part of the partnership is essential. These elements, if managed well, create a strong and indispensible connection with sponsors.
Ensure you have the right tools and processes in place to make it as easy as possible for a partner to stay with you and enjoy the experience of becoming part of your ‘community’s family’.
Keep
Keeping your sponsors is the name of the game! If you’ve employed months of hard work to engage your ideal corporate partner the last thing you want is to lose them because you haven’t delivered what you promised, or worse, created expectations that you weren’t able to keep.
It’s inevitable that partnerships will come to an end at some point and as long as you are able to identify what is happening then you can still maintain respectful and collegiate relationships. However, sometimes things just don’t work out – what do you do then? This phase is about ensuring that you are in control with tools and strategies at your disposal that help you review outcomes and re-evaluate your sponsorships each year, identify whether its best for your organisation to re-engage or exit the partnership and manage situations that may arise where you may have to ‘chalk it up’ to experience and move on.
It’s our goal to keep you in the flow of your sponsorship journey. The second the flow stops, or you skip a step, the process stalls and success diminishes.
Once you’ve engaged your perfect corporate partner the last thing you want is to lose them because you haven’t delivered what you promised, or worse, created expectations that you weren’t able to keep.