There are moments when being “happy go lucky,” or to be spontaneous, and “fly be the seat of your pants,” is an attractive luxury or personality type. Certainly the thought of an upbeat and easy to please individual seems like a low maintenance, low stress relational effort on our part, right? But there are times when those characteristics make you not very likable and definitely not an attractive long term relationship. My husband recently had a minor back surgery and I can assure you that our Dr. was far from “carefree,” or spontaneous. He carefully reviewed his MRI and x-ray, he weighed out the pros and cons, planned out every detail of the surgery - and if he hadn't we would not have relied on his expertise.
Recently I tweeted a tip of the day: “The best thing you can do for your sponsors is find out what your audience wants, then activate accordingly.” You simply cannot be unintentional and carefree and gather this kind of information. If you let your efforts begin and end without doing your homework, without intentionally investigating and rethinking how you can improve your activation in order to grow the level of satisfaction from your audience; it’s not going to happen on its own. This can be applied really with all kinds of sponsorships whether it’s an event or a program, whether it reaches thousands or hundreds; it really just takes being intentional.
So what does this kind of information gathering consist of, and what do these efforts look like?
What your audience wants or needs is a question related to finding where you’re missing the mark altogether in their overall experience, or where you could improve it. There are several ways of finding out this information. The truth is, your sponsor would not be there without your audience, your program or event wouldn’t survive if they weren’t interested in what you’re doing, so the bottom line is figuring out how to create that sticky factor, and how to draw more interest.
Pre/post surveys
While there are many great reasons for an event survey (so many people/departments can benefit from this information); most people think of these surveys as a way of gathering information the sponsor specifically wants to know about. You’ve sat down with your sponsor’s marketing team and discussed what their goals are, and then put together questions that answer whether or not their objectives were met. In addition to this purpose of a survey, you can also ask questions like: “what could make the event better? What did you like most about the experience? Least about the experience? “ etc. Obviously your questions would be much more customize to fit the unique experience you’re creating, and perhaps you’ll even have to get creative about giving incentive to complete these surveys – let’s face it, not everyone wakes up to go to a music festival and looks forward to spending 5-10 minutes completing the invaluable survey you put together. But if they can turn it in for a free beverage or a discount on food, maybe they would.
Research
Every property caters to someone specific. You need to know your target audience for 100 reasons more than the reason I’m giving you here. If you don’t know the answer to this question, stop everything you’re doing and find out. Conduct the necessary research to uncover the defined group you have access to so that you can intelligently communicate this information. Smart sponsors won’t give you a second look without it. OK, back to researching for the purpose of identifying what your audience wants. Are you catering primarily to female professionals? Find out what the trends are with this age group, what celebrities they like, are they using social media, etc. etc. Unique trends can help you incorporate these interests into your program or event. Uncover audience statistics through an array of resources available at your fingertips! Maybe you’ll market differently because you find out that most professional women spend 2 hours a day on social media, and 9 out of 10 are part of groups. (Completely made up information by the way…). Know what’s attractive to or effective with gaining the attention of your target audience, and use that to your benefit. It will make them happier, your sponsors look better for activating to meet their needs; and we all know that happy partners tend to be long term partners.
What do you experience?
You may or may not fall into the classification of your target audience. Find someone close to you who is, and pick their brain. Make a list of basic observations. What do they experience that maybe you didn’t notice since you’re too close to the program? Simply taking a step back and opening your eyes and ears can give you some quality observations. Would this be an event or experience you would return to if you weren’t behind it? How do your volunteers feel? Is the idea or theme that you’re going for being expressed and experienced the way you wanted it to?
Once you’ve embarked on this how to improve exploration effort, the worst thing you can do is sit on the information for too long. Take your observations back to your team; find a sounding board to bounce ideas off of. Embrace a solution oriented idea session. Come up with some action plans, ideas, and activation suggestions and take it back to your sponsors as part of their ROI package. This really piggybacks on last week’s post – this information helps them think about future efforts and gets their mind in a place to consider renewal.
So shake off that “happy go lucky” whatever works attitude and save it for your Saturdays. Your audience will love you for it, and your sponsor will take you seriously as a result. The name of the game is intentional.