Growing up my siblings and I used to gather all the Christmas presents that were under the tree and organize them by person. Sounds like we were type A personality kids, but honestly we just wanted to know how many presents we had and had easy quick access to them on Christmas morning! We wanted to distinguish our gifts from the others that would likely be of no interest to us in the morning. On a related note, I’ve had a lot of phone calls lately where I spend lots of time clarifying how SponsorPark works as opposed to a sponsorship agency or even as it compares to an online database of listings. So I thought it might be helpful to create a blog entry that went over some of those key details in case any of you faithful followers ever had interest in distinguishing the difference.
1. We are a connection resource meant to generate exposure for your sponsorship opportunity- Perhaps this is pretty elementary stuff to most of you. It’s probably clear that our goal is to get your sponsorship opportunity listing in front of more eyeballs – but some people don’t realize this is our primary focus. If a sponsor indicates interest in any of the listings we represent, we put the two of you in touch, give you a heads up of their advanced interest, and exit the scene. We are not part of the next steps for sales, contract negotiations, activation, etc. That being the case, we do find it valuable to refer services on to some agencies that do this, and in turn there are several agencies that find our resource a helpful tool to complement their efforts in getting their opportunities in front of sponsors through a trusted middle man.
2. We allow targeted searches – We are definitely not just a large online database of sponsorship opportunities. Sponsors are not flipping through pages upon pages of thousands of proposal listings, let’s face it, I don’t know many sponsors who would do that. When a sponsor uses our services, they can target specific types of proposals of interest with a range of specific criteria. Locations, dates, price ranges, categories, etc. If they don’t want to take the time to log in every day to conduct these specific searches, they can create a profile or saved search criteria which allow us the freedom to automatically send them proposals upon a fit to their indicated criteria.
3. We campaign to sponsors of your interest – We have marketed to a list of active U.S. sponsor numbering around 3,000; obviously this is a great start, but is honestly just the tip of the iceberg when you’re talking nationwide. We put our heads together as a team and said, if we’re going to campaign and market to sponsors anyway, we might as well be doing so to the list our clients are most interested in getting in front of. So – if you are a Premium or Professional level member, you can submit a list of your interests to us (preferably with contact info to speed things up), and a brief explanation why you think they are a good fit, we’ll reach out to them directly on your behalf. Now, we’re still not selling, we’re introducing our resource and presenting your proposal as an example in a presentation, but it has proved to be a great way to get proactive about the exposure we provide you. We also offer this option only to Premium or Professional level members only simply because their proposals offer significantly more information for a sponsor to truly consider when identifying a possible new partner.
4. We offer a foundational level proposal template – Just to clarify, SponsorPark takes the approach that customized proposals are the way to go. So we are by no means replacing that with a cookie cutter approach. What we are doing, is helping you to generate a foundational proposal which will give a starting point for a sponsor to better understand what you are all about, where you’re going, what kinds of benefits you have to offer, pricing, location, target audience – the things that they have indicated to us is incredibly important as they consider a potential new partner. If you appear to be a fit with the profile we have you put together, there’s a good chance they’ll indicate that interest and a customized proposal would likely be the next step after you get in touch. It was really surprising to us how many sponsors told us that properties tend to come to them without enough information to legitimately consider them as a partner, we’re trying to bridge that gap in the industry by giving you a helpful starting point!
So, there you have it. These are some of the top questions posed about how our service is distinct and different from other connection agencies, and I’m happy to say SponsorPark definitely works hard to bridge some serious gaps in the sponsorship world. If ever you have any questions, feel free to throw them our direction at info@sponsorpark.com, and we’d be happy to respond!