.jpg)
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.