Tip #2: Offer tiered packages / benefits: When you communicate the benefits of partnering to a sponsor, a quick way to kill interest is not to offer options, or worse, no insight at all as to what your asking price might be. Your tiers should also be cascading – make it worth a sponsors while to offer more support in exchange for a more extensive package of benefits. 

Everyone likes options.  It’s why Baskin Robbins boasts of starting with 31 flavors of ice cream (now with over 1,000), and why you see as many styles of cars on the road as people driving them!  “One size fits all,” is an expired truth unless you’re talking about spandex or stretchy pants – and even then it’s not always true. 

Establishing Packages and Benefits for a sponsor is critical and communicates that you understand the meaning of a: “mutually beneficial relationship.” Offering clearly specified benefits for a sponsor’s support is what separates true sponsorship from charitable donations; if all you’re offering is a tax write off, you’re not looking for sponsors, you’re looking for donors. 

Establishing benefits to a potential partner means you need to inventory your assets.  Make it a whiteboard session with all of those department decision makers involved in your sponsorship opportunity.  Sit down and brainstorm what you have to offer, your assets – you’ll have your basics of logos, tickets and general hospitality, but you’ll want to take it beyond that.  Consider your tangible assets – radio coverage, celebrity involvement, audience numbers, publications, website usage, and guaranteed media, the various signage opportunities and your audience database... the list goes on and on.  Then consider your intangible assets; prestige, popularity, audience loyalty, exclusivity, or media interest.  Once you’ve inventoried what you have to offer, you then need to communicate the value of the related benefit.  Now, it’s wise to remember that the value of each of these offerings will change for each sponsor that reviews them.  One brand strategy might be that they really want partner exclusivity in a particular category of events, where it’s not as valuable to another potential sponsor.  Another sponsor might love the fact that you have tremendous advertisement abilities because they are introducing a new product and want to get in front of more of their target audience for the big push!  It really depends – so the value you offer as your package price is really more valuable to some sponsors in relation to their marketing objectives and less valuable to others in the same respect.  But can you see the problem in not reflecting a price at all?!  A potential sponsor needs to know where to start – are you asking $15,000 or $50,000 as a ballpark asking price?  This way they know much better whether it’s a match made in Heaven, or if their efforts are stronger elsewhere.  I once heard a sponsor from a major corporate brand say that if they were given a proposal and there was no asking price established, the review stopped there.  They pitched it.  “When a sponsorship opportunity representative offers me no insight into the price of the sponsorship and immediately want a meeting, it makes me suspicious.”  Yikes.  Keep your proposal from getting tossed in the trash and give at least a ballpark. 

Why multiple packages?  If you have just one option, then you have just one consideration and one response.  If you have multiple packages and/or cascading packages, you are able to ask them to consider a range of benefits, just because they can’t afford the title package doesn’t mean they don’t want to partner at all.  And if they chose the middle tiered package, you then have the opportunity to up sell them to the next level.  At one point in my life I used to manage at a Victoria’s Secret Beauty store, and it was standard practice that if a customer was interested in a medium sized bottle of perfume, that we would never, never simply ring it through.  Our standard response was: “Oh, I see that you found ____ in the 12 oz. bottle; you’ll love the fragrance… Now, did you see that you can have the 24 oz. bottle for just 10 more dollars?  It’s double the product for less than half of what you’re spending for the regular size.”  Nine times out of ten they grabbed the bigger bottle.  We highlighted their benefit, the cost, and the value for upgrading.  You want to do the same with sponsorship. 

Now, the tough part about having cascading packages is that it can make it tougher to customize by moving package assets around.  If you are open to customization (which we also strongly recommend), you need to establish this in your proposal.  Being flexible can make the difference between a sponsor riding the fence and a sponsor signing a contract.  We tell our site users often that the packages and benefits section is a rough start.  We realize (and so do most sponsors), that there is no way to complete a package listing without knowing what the sponsor is looking for as a benefit.  And there’s no way to know what they want until you meet with them and discuss these details – but you aren’t likely going to get a meeting until you communicate what you have to offer as a starting point. 

So take a look at your assets and consider how you might package them for various levels of sponsorship interest.  You don’t need 31 “flavors” of sponsorship, but a few is nice for choosy sponsors.

Tip #1: Write a relevant initial proposal -

One point we need to pause to dig into a bit is the fact that what was mentioned in this first tip is an initial proposal.  There are certain key pieces of information you must consider and contribute before you get to the “fun” part of customization.  It’s like building or redecorating a room – you have to consider the basics of where you’re putting an outlet and framing up the room which is all essential before you can consider what color you want to paint the walls or what kind of decorative theme you’ll be portraying.  Another reason we are stopping to highlight the initial proposal is because if you use connection resources such as SponsorPark, you are not likely going to customize a proposal until a connection has been established – and you aren’t able to establish this connection until you have outlined the core reasons why your opportunity is a good fit.  Since the information included in an initial proposal is critical, we believe making it a best practice to start off writing any proposal with the steps I’m highlighting here is still quite valuable to any reader involved in the proposal writing process – regardless of your affiliation with SponsorPark.  All of the elements of an initial proposal you will find in a customized proposal – you’ll simply add to it.  A customized proposal caters to a unique company or brand, and it could not be passed along to another without major changes.   There really is no such thing as a “cookie cutter” or “one size fits all,” proposal – and we uphold this wholeheartedly, but with sponsorship getting more and more competitive, it’s more important than ever to write an foundational overview of both quantitative and qualitative reasons why you are a good fit for a sponsor.  Establishing the details of your target audience and breaking down the kind of exposure you’ll have access to on their behalf, the history of what you’ve done in the past and how popular your opportunity is will all set you apart from the proposals who didn’t take the time to do establish this essential piece.  Before you go to all the work of customizing a proposal, you need to pull together all the valuable information about your sponsorship opportunity that a sponsor is going to want to know, and organize it in a clear and concise manner communicating in the language of your anticipated reader.  When a potential sponsor reads this kind of proposal, they’ll breathe a sigh of relief having their crucial questions answered quickly.  This kind of care communicates that you are thorough, reliable, and understand that this is mutually beneficial – you realize they need to know upfront the foundational pieces of who you are and what you have to offer before you get to the fun part of making the experience unique to them.  You have to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run. 

When we were in the market research phase of our development, one of our valuable contacts at a large, widely known corporate entity gave me an interesting piece of information.  “I can’t tell you how many intelligent individuals sit across from me at my desk and pitch me their sponsorship request with little to no understanding of what I HAVE to know before we can take the conversation to the next level.”  He continued on; “Occasionally I would graciously tell them it sounded like they had an interesting concept, but to contact me again once they had put together a more complete proposal.  Nine times out of ten they would stare blankly at me, until they finally asked what information I wanted them to include.  I gently responded, ‘well, I’m not going to coach you on how to take my money, but if you can figure it out we can talk customization after you get me this first round of information.’”  Now, I realize that sponsors have to realize that sometimes they have to offer direction for what kind of marketing support they’re after before you can customize the packages and benefits to their needs, but you don’t have to know these things in order to write a first level, initial proposal.  And this initial proposal will indicate either that yes, this appears to be a potential fit – let’s dig deeper and talk about customizing; or absolutely not – there’s no reason to waste each other’s time in another meeting.  If the essentials match, you are able to move forward confidently, knowing that both parties can intelligently explain why this partnership is a good one.  Or, they don’t match up, and you can also walk away knowing you put your best foot forward.
 
In regards to the specific information you ought to include in your proposals, we just finished the blog series on: “Elements of a Sophisticated Proposal,” so the substance of an informative, relevant proposal has already been established – reference our previous blogs for a deeper understanding of what you should include.  I highly recommend educating yourself and doing the appropriate research on what to include in a good proposal before you write one in order to be even remotely competitive.  Just to recap, the following elements are what we consider critical to include: a description of the opportunity, dates, target audience information, event analysis, media exposure, your reach (or the quantified number of your audience), the packages and benefits (open to customization), current sponsors, dates, and contact information.  Again, all of this can be more deeply studied in previous blogs, and there are other great resources out there as well which help you consider content and phrasing. 

The “template” for an initial proposal is what we walk you through on the SponsorPark website.  We took the time to inventory from various levels of corporate sponsors what it is they needed to see upfront in a proposal.  We compiled the lists, compared and contrasted them, researched what we saw in case by case scenarios, and used this information to create our own proposal template.  Again, this is all what sponsors indicated to us was of critical importance to review before they could move on to the next step of discussing customizable benefits and activation strategies.  So we mean it when we say that we’re truly using our resource to get you in touch with the most appropriate potential sponsors; we want to equip you and connect you!

In closing, what I recommend in order to be competitive in sponsorship is to really spend some time in writing your proposal.  It takes more time in the beginning, but it’s sure to turn heads more effectively once it is complete.  If you do the first steps right and complete a high quality, relevant proposal, you’ll appear much more efficient, and know much more quickly who’s interested and why.