Creating The Right Internal Culture For Sponsorship Success
Despite the way many For-Purpose organisations go about trying to engage corporate support, a fundraiser’s journey must begin with ensuring you have robust internal buy-in on behalf of your Board and CEO, as well as a commitment to fostering an internal culture of ‘commercial acceptance’.
What is ‘commercial acceptance’?
The best way to describe it would be to say your organisation is ‘sponsorship friendly’ or your Board and team has a good sense of business acumen. You understand that sponsorship is a business deal, that sponsorship comes out of a company’s marketing budget and that means you are competing with all of the ways they want to promote their brand.
Corporate partners will be looking to derive a return on their investment, and the benefits of sponsorship are very much a ‘two-way’ street where both parties are more successful as a result of their partnership together.
Many organisations mistakenly start their sponsorship strategy by flooding brands that they consider to be ‘low hanging fruit’ with generic proposals in the hope that they will be delightfully overwhelmed by potential sponsors beating a path to their door.
Once upon a time, this method yielded some success, but the landscapes has changed dramatically and companies are being spoilt for choice with the number of charities and events seeking to diversify their income streams. Not to mention the fact that brands can access seriously sophisticated marketing techniques, like geolocation tracking and predicting purchasing behaviour through algorithms.
And yet with all this growth and change, our sector is largely still sending out gold, silver, bronze proposals with a list of places they will put a brands logo!
You can perhaps see why we need to change our thinking about how we can be successful with sponsorship?
Your strength lies in your role as a gatekeeper to a community of followers that are the ideal target market to the right brand, not where you will put their logo and what size advertisement they will receive. Sponsorship is about CONNECTION, not advertising.
This process starts with your Board and helping them foster a mindset shift from a fundraising model of seeking philanthropy, to committing to a corporate sponsorship strategy.
Every successful sponsorship strategy takes a whole organisation to deliver it, and starts at the top and flows downwards and outwards throughout the organisation.
Is your Board educated about how they need to be involved in the sponsorship journey?
