Everything You Need To Know About Running a Sponsorship Campaign

A highly successful sponsorship campaign is not a one-person endeavor. It requires leadership and coordination of a network of people–board members and others. The solicitation process needs to be managed so that multiple volunteers are not approaching the same prospect and those that solicit need to be properly trained, equipped, and empowered.

Rebecca H. Davis, PhD, CFRE recently joined us for a webinar in which she shared strategies, lessons learned, and tools for raising your sponsorship dollars to new heights.

Full Transcript

Steven Shattuck: I’m the VP of Marketing here at Bloomerang, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion. Before we begin, I want to let everyone know that I’m recording this presentation. I’ll send out the recording a little later this afternoon, along with Rebecca’s slides. So look for an email from me if you want to review the content or share it with a friend or co-worker.

During the presentation, please don’t be afraid to chat in any questions or comments you have. We’re going to save some time at the end for Q&A, so don’t be shy. We’ll have five or ten minutes for questions.

If this is your first webinar with us, welcome, and thanks for being here. We do these webinars just about every Thursday. We bring on a guest for an educational presentation. In addition, Bloomerang offers a really great donor management software program. If you’re in the market for that, we’d love for you to check it out. You can learn more on our website, and just let me know if you have any questions.

I want to go ahead and introduce our guest. She is Rebecca Davis, PhD, CFRE. Hey Rebecca, how is it going?

Rebecca Davis: Great. I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me to participate. It’s a great opportunity.

Steven Shattuck: I’m glad you’re here too. I think we’ve been planning this since way back in November, so it’s fun for that date to finally be here. A lot of people registered, and I know they’re interested in the topic. It’s one we get requested quite a bit, so it’s great to have you.

For those of you who don’t know Rebecca, she has more than 25 years of professional experience in academic and nonprofit settings, in fundraising and event management, volunteer coordination, adult education, and research and writing. She is a graduate of the AFP (Association of Fundraising Professionals) Faculty Training Academy. Rebecca is a master trainer, and she has been a Certified Fund Raising Executive, CFRE, since 2007.

She has worked with lots of organizations, including the Alzheimer’s Association, the National Down Syndrome Congress, and The Children’s Center for Hope and Healing, all kinds of places. She has been a development director, she has been an ED, and she has coordinated a lot of sponsorship campaigns. That’s what she’s going to be talking to us about today. So Rebecca, I’m not going to take any more time away from you. Why don’t you go ahead and get us started.

Rebecca Davis: Sure. I know a lot of you in the fundraising profession have mixed feelings about special events, but I’m one of those who just loves them. I enjoy participating in them. And of course, we all know that one of the keys to a successful special event is a successful sponsorship campaign, with sponsorships really coming in strong. That’s one of the ways we can make our special events successful.

So I want to talk to you today about how to lead a sponsorship campaign. I believe one of the keys to a strong sponsorship campaign is to run it like a campaign, much like a capital campaign or an annual campaign, by planning it tactically. And one of the keys to that is to recruit a team, organize your team, manage your team, and provide leadership to your team.

I have talked to some foundation and corporate relations specialists in the fundraising profession who believe they personally should solicit all of their corporate partners and all of their sponsorships. They believe they should be the one to get out and touch base, and every single year they should be the one to make the ask. I understand their reasoning, and that’s great. But a lot of us in the fundraising world don’t work in a position where we have the luxury of time to personally make the ask of every single corporate partner or prospect in our organization. We just have too many prospects to be able to see.

Plus, I personally believe I don’t have the monopoly on passion for the organization, on connections, or on opportunities to open doors. I’ve certainly been at organizations where I had board members and volunteers who were at least as good as I am at asking, if not better. So why not bring them along on the team, empower them, set them to work, and let them work their magic? Some of them are really, really good, and I want them on the team to ask. I believe our boat will go further, faster, if I put other team members in it and allow them to grow.

I want to point out throughout this presentation that there are things people who are not good at asking can do to help the sponsorship team and help us get to a larger goal. I do believe good askers are not born, they are made, and you can teach most people to ask. Some people aren’t good at it for one reason or another. Some people don’t have the common sense. I’ve certainly worked with volunteers who had the heart but maybe not the common sense or the right manners, so I didn’t want them asking. But there are things they can do too, and I’m going to try to point those out along the way.

I believe sponsorship campaigns are a lot like rowing. Though I don’t know a lot about the sport, I believe rowing is really beautiful. There’s a synchronicity to it, and the way the team makes it look almost effortless. But there’s a lot going on under the surface, and a lot of adjustments being made.

Steven Shattuck: The slide I see is “Sponsorship campaigns are like rowing,” and we’ve got a picture of rowers. Is that where you want to be?

Rebecca Davis: No, I actually want to be further ahead.

Steven Shattuck: There you go. You did it.

Rebecca Davis: Okay. Rowing requires a lot of coordination and effort, and it requires a lot of leadership. If you take a close look at a rowing team in competition, there is someone who sits in the very back of the boat, called the coxswain, who is usually a lot smaller than the other people in the boat. This person is usually facing the opposite way from everybody else. Everybody else in the boat faces backward, and the coxswain is the one and only person facing forward.

The coxswain has a headset on and talks to the team through it throughout the race. They’re calling tiny adjustments to each of the members, telling them which way to pull, how to adjust their oars, and how hard to pull. None of the rowers can see the river ahead, the current, or the way the wind is coming across the water. The coxswain is telling everybody which way to go so they don’t end up going in circles, and is coordinating everything.

The coxswain often doesn’t get a lot of credit, because he or she is not rowing and sometimes gets teased for not pulling his or her weight. But this person is really key to navigating the river. I want you, as a fundraiser, to think of yourself as the coxswain, calling the shots, coordinating, and making it happen. I’ll talk a little more about that as we go forward, because you’re the person who’s going to map out the strategy, and the team is going to count on you to coordinate what you’re doing throughout the campaign.

Now, the first thing you need to do to get your campaign together is to put your sponsorship offer together. While it says the first thing, I actually do it as the last thing, at the end of last year’s campaign. When I’m wrapping up last year’s campaign, I do a debrief. What worked well last year? What didn’t work well? What could I have done to sweeten the deal for my sponsors? I’m constantly looking for what I can do to make my sponsorship offers more attractive to my sponsors.

We who love our organizations tend to think our sponsorship opportunities are great. Why wouldn’t our business partners want to partner with us? But go to a professional baseball game, or a car race track like a NASCAR event or the Indy 500, and take a look at how they treat their sponsors and what their sponsors have the opportunity to get. Then think about your event. You’ll quickly realize that what the typical nonprofit organization can offer its sponsors is very different from what a professional, or even an amateur, sports event can offer its corporate partners. For the most part, we’re not as strong a partner in many, many ways.

We do have some other things to offer. We have really loyal, passionate followers, and we have a great image, and being associated with that image can be really good for our corporate partners. But the exposure and media opportunities a typical nonprofit can offer are limited. So we have to think about what our corporate partners want and what we can do to make ourselves as attractive a partner as we possibly can.

I’m often surprised, when I first start working with a nonprofit, at how little the organization actually knows about what kind of a partner it is for a corporate sponsor. I’ll start working with an organization and they won’t have any idea how many website visitors they have on average each month. They won’t know how many email addresses they have, or, if they mail a newsletter, how many addresses it reaches.

Those are the specifics you really need to know, because you need to know what your reach is. You need to have all that data for your event. You also need to write a media plan. Having a written media plan, and being able to articulate to your sponsors how you’re going to promote the event and how you’re going to share it during the event, makes you more attractive to a potential sponsor. So you need to put your sponsorship offer together, and figure out how to make it attractive to your sponsors, before you even begin.

If you don’t know what your sponsors want, talk to them. Ask what they’re looking for in a partnership, and they will surprise you. One of the things I’m hearing more and more from corporate partners is that they’re looking for engagement opportunities. They don’t just want their logo on our poster. They want an opportunity to actually interact with our participants.

For example, when I was working with the Alzheimer’s Association, the people who showed up at our events were most often people who had a loved one with some form of dementia. One of our biggest sets of sponsors was people in the long-term care industry. They wanted to interact with our participants because they recognized that sooner or later, a lot of the people at our events were going to be looking for a long-term care placement for their loved one.

I just got back from the Association of Fundraising Professionals conference, and a lot of the vendors in the exhibit hall were interested in the address list of the participants. They wanted to mail us to tell us about their product and invite us to come by their booth to learn more. That’s an engagement opportunity, and companies are very much interested in that. So think about what engagement opportunities you can offer at your event to the companies you’re interested in working with.

You’re also going to want to attach some value to your sponsorship offer. Are you going to ask $10,000? $50,000? $500 for your sponsorship level or package? That depends on two things, both of which require some market research. One is what other nonprofit organizations in your area charge for a similar package. If you’re in a small community, what you can charge will be different than if you’re in a very large city. You need to research what others in your area are charging.

Recently I did some market research for an organization on golf tournament sponsorships in their area. I found they were very competitive, and right in the market range, for the larger sponsorships. But they were way off on the smaller ones. They were only charging $75 for a sponsorship when everybody else in the community was charging a lot more. They were missing opportunities across a whole sponsorship area, so for some of the smaller levels, I encouraged them to step it up and charge more.

The other piece is not just what other nonprofits charge, but what businesses are paying. For example, are they willing to pay for a newspaper ad? If you can give them equivalent coverage in your press and on your website, and they pay for that in other media, what does it cost them to buy? You can compare that way and put a value on those things, and then you know what you can market your packages for.

Some great additions to your offer that will help you sell your package are testimonials from past sponsors. If you can get some of your past sponsors to reach out and say, “Hey, this is a phenomenal opportunity for me,” it can be really impactful and powerful in helping you attract a new sponsor. News clips of your event from last year are also very helpful.

Here’s one of the ways your volunteers can help from the get-go. After you’ve put your sponsorship package together, one of the first ways your volunteers can help is by identifying prospects. This is one of the many ways people who are not good at asking can help: they can help generate a prospect list.

Where are you going to find your prospects? As always in fundraising, one of the best places to find donors is among your past donors, so last year’s sponsors are of course the best place to start. You can also look to board members’ companies. Sometimes board members’ companies haven’t been invited to be a sponsor. You can look at board members’ associate companies, the companies’ managers, the organization’s biggest spenders, and the companies interested in your audience. Again, think about the Alzheimer’s example, and how certain companies were interested in the people who were at our event. And look at the community for companies that have marketing dollars.

That’s just a start. Brainstorm with your committee. We’ve never had trouble, in any of the communities I’ve worked in, generating more prospects than we could possibly get to. We usually start with the low-hanging fruit, the people who are easiest. We mail a bunch of sponsorship requests and then move on to people who are more distant from us.

One committee I worked with decided, “We know we’re going to need sponsorship from these people, so let’s start with the people we don’t think we’re going to get sponsorships from, with new relationships, and work on those first. Then we’ll come back to the people we’re really confident are going to give.” Sometimes we never have time to get to the long shots. So we started with the long shots first, and we got a tremendous number of new relationships and new sponsorships. It was a great year for us. That’s a strategy I recommend you consider: starting not with the low-hanging fruit, not with last year’s prospects or sponsors, but with people you’re going to have to work at a little bit.

Another role for people who don’t belong on the asking front is sponsor care. After you’ve gotten a sponsor to sign on the dotted line, there’s a lot of work that has to be done. You need to write them a welcome package. The first thing in that package is of course to say thank you, but you also need to go over the benefits with them, even though you went over them in the sales part of the relationship. I’m always amazed at how some people don’t understand their benefits.

I’ve had sponsor relationships where we went over the benefits in developing the relationship, and then they chose the sponsorship and somehow didn’t realize they had a table at a gala. It gets close to the gala, I’m asking who is going to take their tickets and who is going to fill their table, and they say, “We have a table?” So keep going over that again and again with them.

This is a great thing for people who aren’t good at asking to do. They can follow up with, “We’re so excited that you’re coming. Who is going to be sitting at your table?” Just touch base with the sponsors about that multiple times. That way you’re not a few weeks from the gala talking to them about who is going to fill the table while they scramble to figure it out. You do want the table filled, and you want your event to be full. You want it to look like a success, and if you have empty seats, it’s not going to look like one.

If you have a silent auction, you want it to be full too, because you want bidders at your auction. I’m just thinking about one type of event. You want sponsors to know what their benefits are, and you also want them to use their benefits, so you can involve the person who is not good at asking in that part of the sponsorship committee.

Also, at the event itself, you can assign someone who is not good at asking to be a sponsor greeter or sponsor concierge. They can make sure the sponsors’ wine glasses are not empty, introduce them to people or to board members, and help make sure they’re comfortable working the room. Sponsors are just like everybody else in that they can be shy and uncomfortable networking. Someone who is not especially good at asking can help make them feel comfortable and welcome. There are a lot of different things they can do.

When you have your volunteer committee, one of the first things you have to do is provide some training, especially if you’re going to involve them in making contacts with potential sponsors and asking. The biggest thing I have to help volunteers understand is the motivations of potential sponsors. Volunteers with tremendously big hearts often don’t understand that businesses have very different motivations for getting involved as sponsors than they themselves have for volunteering. I have to help them understand that businesses don’t usually have big-hearted philanthropic reasons for sponsoring. Some do, of course, but many have business motivations for getting involved with a nonprofit organization and its event.

So I explain cause marketing and some of its objectives, and that’s one of the biggest things we go over in volunteer training. And of course, people have to learn to ask. I believe that’s a skill people acquire, not something they’re generally born knowing how to do. I find the writings of Jerold Panas very good for that. His book “Asking” is great, and several of his other books are really helpful too. I’ll often use excerpts from his books in volunteer trainings, because he has sample scripts of questions and answers that donors have given, and situations he’s been in. They help with things like sample scripts for getting a meeting and for overcoming objections, and a lot of other things. I find several of his books really useful for training, and I recommend them.

Everybody hates role-play. They feel very put on the spot. But at the AFP Faculty Training Academy that I attended, I think in 2010, BJ Bischoff taught the course, and she shared a way of doing role-play that I’m sure is not original to her, but that is where I learned it. It’s team-based and collaborative. There are two seats at the front, and you line everybody up behind one or the other. You take turns sitting in the hot seat, and the person behind the person in the chair taps them on the shoulder and relieves them, so they’re no longer in the hot seat. Around and round you go.

The person in the hot seat is only there for a couple of minutes before they get tapped out and the next person sits down. It’s actually a lot of fun this way, because you’re only in the hot seat for a couple of minutes, and the people behind the person in the chair help coach them on how to role-play. It’s a much more fun way to practice asking. Somebody can practice being the donor, with objections or questions. That’s worked really well in volunteer training on asking.

Another important thing to cover in volunteer training is that volunteers need to know what’s going to come up when they go ask. Questions are going to come up, negotiations are going to come up, and issues are going to come up. You need to prepare them for those. When you go out and ask for a sponsorship yourself, what comes up? What questions and objections typically arise? You need to think through how you want volunteers to handle those issues.

It may be that you don’t want them to handle those issues at all. In that case you tell them, “If this comes up, I want you to say, ‘I’ll have to get back to the development director and get back to you.’” You’re telling them, “This is the limit of your empowerment. I don’t want you to get into these things.” Or maybe you want to empower them to handle one or two of these issues but not others. Whatever you want, you need to think it through in advance and anticipate it. Then tell them to anticipate it, and let them know how you want them to resolve it.

Another big thing we talk about in training is coordination, and the role you play in it. This comes up all the time when there are lots of volunteers asking. I want volunteers to generate new prospects, but I find lots of them will generate the same prospect. “You know, Rebecca, I was driving around town and I thought we should ask Sam’s Club.” I think that’s great, but ten people have said we should ask Sam’s Club.

My very worst fear is that somebody goes ahead and asks Sam’s Club for $25 when I really wanted to ask for $1,000 or $5,000. That’s a small example. There may be some other company I wanted to ask for a whole lot more, and somebody has asked them for $25. What happens then? The company gives $25. The company expects you to be grateful. The company feels proud, like they’ve done their part. And you’re in this awkward position because you wanted to ask for a whole heck of a lot more. It’s a really terrible position to be in.

So I don’t want anybody to ask without talking to me first. In volunteer training I tell them, “It’s great for you to come up with ideas, but please talk to me first.” I explain that once we’ve asked, it’s really difficult to go back and ask for a different amount, and the amount we initially ask for may not be the right amount.

I also explain that if one person approaches a company for one amount and another person approaches them for another amount, it looks like the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. It makes us look ill-prepared, like we don’t know what we’re doing and aren’t coordinated. That doesn’t make us look like a good candidate for a sponsorship. So we want to coordinate that.

Of course, coming out of volunteer training, I want the volunteers to walk away equipped. This picture is supposed to look like Reese Witherspoon in her role in “Wild,” all loaded down with her horrible backpack. I want volunteers to have all the information they’re going to need to be able to ask, but I really don’t want them loaded down. There will inevitably be some volunteer who wants to be that loaded down, and for that volunteer I will give them whatever they need, because I find that volunteer will not feel safe and secure without it. If they want all the stuff, I will load them down that much. Most people will not need all of it, just some.

But there will be some volunteers who require every single item on this list to feel safe and secure going out into the world to ask. So decide which things your volunteers are most likely to need to be equipped to ask. Some of these things they’re definitely going to need, so make sure they have them. Maybe you want to provide them electronically on a flash drive. More and more often, that’s how I give them to volunteers these days. One thing I almost always make sure people have is an emergency number for me. That way they know they can always get in touch with me, which gives everybody peace of mind. Once they have that, they’re ready to go.

Here’s a sponsorship tip. Sometimes organizations will want to put DVDs or videos on USB flash drives into the package. Don’t do it. Every business I’ve ever talked to says they don’t watch them. They end up in the trash. Even if your communications director says, “But our DVD is going to win an Emmy,” or “Theo James himself made a personal appearance to attest to the worthiness of our organization,” don’t do it. And if somebody tells you that you must put it in the package, let it slip out in your car on the way somewhere. It’s not going to get watched. It’s just not.

Unless the company you’re going to visit has a CEO who calls you and says, “My wife watched it in her Sunday school class and she begged me to ask you to bring it over and watch it with me,” don’t take it into somebody’s office and expect them to watch it with you. They don’t want to. So I would not include a DVD under any circumstances.

At the conclusion of your first volunteer training, make sure folks walk away with some sort of resource or reference manual. I do that for a lot of reasons. When people walk away with something physical, like a notebook or a USB flash drive, they feel like they have something tangible that reminds them they learned something. It’s also comforting. They feel like they have something to refer back to when they have a moment of anxiety or can’t remember something important.

Also, people like me, who are so in the moment, find that when the moment is over, I realize I don’t remember something. I thought I did. I was totally with you at that moment, but then the moment is past and I think, “What was that? I can’t recall.” So I need something to go back to that brings it back up. That’s helpful.

Then there are volunteer assignments. You’ve got a long list of prospects and a list of volunteers, so how are you going to pair the volunteers with the prospects? Initially I pair volunteers with only a couple of prospects. I don’t pair all the prospects with all the volunteers up front. I set volunteers up with just a couple and leave the rest for later, after I can see how things are going. I don’t want to give volunteers a long list of assignments because I don’t want to overwhelm them, and I also want to see how things are going. If somebody is doing great, I want to give them more. If somebody is moving a little slowly or not having a lot of success, I want to wait until they find their voice and get their feet on the ground before giving them a lot more.

Early on, I pair everybody with just a couple, and I try to find ones on the list that are going to be easy asks. I set people up to win. I don’t give anybody a really difficult assignment at first, not new volunteers and not people who’ve never asked before.

Personally, when I hear a yes and I close a sponsorship or get a gift, it’s like a little burst of dopamine for me. It’s a high, and I got hooked on that high a very long time ago. Probably a lot of you on this webinar are the same. I want my volunteers to experience that, because I feel like if they do, I can get them hooked. I want them to have that early victory and know what it feels like. I think it feels so awesome that they’ll get hooked and keep coming back and coming back.

So I set them up for success early on. Later, when they’ve had some successes and know they can do it, I’ll give them more challenging assignments. I typically try to save the really terrible assignments for myself. If there’s a prospect on my list who is a total curmudgeon, or a really difficult negotiator who makes my life miserable, I try to keep that person for myself. I try not to subject any volunteer to the very worst of the prospects.

In terms of getting in the door, I have just a couple of thoughts. You all know how to use connections to get in the door. You can also use letters of introduction from well-known community members, and you’ve probably tried that as well.

One thing I’ve done with great success a couple of times, when my organizations were trying to ratchet up an event, was this. One time I was working for an organization that had almost no community visibility, even though it was 25 years old, and it was relaunching an event. The organization held a free breakfast for corporate leaders and got a bunch of them into a room. We got somebody to sponsor the breakfast and pay for it, so it was free for the corporate leaders. We held it before work, around 8:00 or 8:30. I can’t remember exactly what time. The breakfast itself was about 15 minutes long, followed by a very short 15-minute presentation.

We gave a really brief overview, three to five minutes on who we are. We said, “We’re relaunching this event. Even though we’ve been around the community for a long time and you may not be aware of us, we’ve been operating pretty quietly. We’ve been doing good work. We’ve been here, but we’ve been quiet, and we’re relaunching this event. We’d like to reach out to you to talk about it. We feel it’s an event you’d be very interested in, and we’re going to talk to you about sponsorship. There is a card in your seat. We’d love for you to leave your name and contact information so we can follow up, and there is a flyer in your seat.”

People filled out the card, left it, and said, “You can contact us.” So we got people’s permission to contact them to talk further. It was no obligation, just leave us your information if we can follow up for a 20- or 30-minute chat. We got permission to contact them about sponsorship, and it was great. We grew sponsorship significantly that year. I’ve had a couple of organizations do that, and we’ve always had really good success. It was permission-based marketing, and it was wonderful. I encourage you to try that.

Next is sponsor care. We talked about this a little when we talked about volunteers who don’t ask. Some of the sponsors that I have, and that you have, I’m sure are very high maintenance. I want them to feel very well treated. Even if they don’t literally get a facial or a mud bath, I want them to feel well cared for, and that’s extremely important.

When we wrap up volunteer training, the coaching is not a one-and-done. Usually we have a volunteer training session to get started, but then we continue to coach all through the campaign. Depending on your organization and how dispersed you are, you might get together face-to-face, over Google Hangouts, or over a conference call. I have worked with organizations in one city, organizations dispersed across the state, and organizations stretched all across the country. However you can do it, I’d love it if you can be together in person.

If you can’t, get on a conference call, share your successes, and talk through what’s going on. If you can identify a common problem or two, or if somebody can share “This is a challenge I’m running into,” you can brainstorm that challenge together, and you can all learn from it. You can all learn from successes too. It’s a great way to publicly praise someone, and it’s good for morale to celebrate people’s successes.

One thing you can do to keep energy and momentum going is to celebrate and offer encouragement. A theme is often very fun. One year for a volunteer training, we took the “Finding Nemo” movie and took Dory’s advice to just keep swimming. We concluded the volunteer training with a little clip from Nemo where Dory sings “just keep swimming.” My volunteers loved it. They thought it was hilarious, and we were swimming throughout the volunteer campaign.

On the right there’s a picture of some board members. At the last board meeting before the event, I took a bunch of dollar store swim goggles into the meeting and passed around a bucket full of them. I said, “I invite you to put on your swim goggles. I invite you to put some on the rearview mirror of your car, and as you drive around town for the next couple of weeks, I want you to use them as a reminder to go ahead and make one more ask. One more ask can make a difference in whether or not we make goal.”

I swear, as I drove around town in the final weeks of the campaign, I saw swim goggles bobbing in people’s rearview mirrors. And these board members that evening, the one in the middle was 80 or 90 years old, were swimming in the board meeting with their goggles on. That is absolutely one of my favorite pictures.

Back to the rowing: the coxswain, the team’s coordinator, traditionally gets dumped in the river at the end of the race if they’re successful. In this particular campaign, where we were swimming through with the “Finding Nemo” theme, we were very successful at the end. It was a great campaign. I was giving out some volunteer awards as a celebration, and a couple of my volunteers came busting through the door with a six-foot inflatable Nemo, singing “just keep swimming.” You can tell they were very happy in this picture. I think this was the fundraiser’s version of being dunked in the drink. It was definitely a happy day.

Just to recap, to run a successful campaign you need to build your team, identify your prospects, put together your sponsorship offer, train the team, teach them to ask, help them understand your corporate partners, equip them, give them ongoing support, set them up for success, coordinate, help volunteers get in the door, take care of your sponsors, and celebrate success. The last thing is to debrief after the event.

You need to debrief with your sponsors after the event, or ask your volunteers to. Find out what they thought about the event. What were their expectations? Were they met? Were they exceeded? How can you improve the event next year? I also ask, “Are you willing to be a sponsor next year?” If I can close next year’s sponsorship at the end of this year’s campaign, I try to. And to come back to putting your offer together for next year, this debrief process is part of that. What can I learn that’s going to help me put my sponsorship offer together for the following year? Just to reemphasize, if I can close the deal for next year, I go ahead and try.

So we’re going to wrap it up here and take some questions, but first I want to let you know how you can reach me. I’m a consultant in the mountains of north Georgia, and all of my contact information is on my website, which is on this slide. I encourage you to reach out to me anytime. I’d love to hear from all of you. If you don’t get your question answered today, I’m happy to take questions by email through the web address on this slide.

Steven Shattuck: Thanks, Rebecca. That is an awesome presentation. You’ve got ten minutes to stick around for questions. Is that okay with you?

Rebecca Davis: That sounds great.

Steven Shattuck: Cool. We have a few that have come in already, and I just want to encourage people to ask away. We’ve got Rebecca here for probably about ten more minutes. Rebecca, I’ll just roll through these. Meredith is wondering, “What do you find are the biggest motivations for businesses to sponsor nonprofit events? What have you run into?”

Rebecca Davis: With cause marketing, businesses are looking for a partner, someone who can help them reach their objectives. Whatever their objectives are, if they want to reach more customers, they want to partner with somebody who can help them do that. To keep drawing from the Alzheimer’s Association example, one of the clients I’m working with right now is in senior care, and we’re partnering with a lot of organizations that serve seniors. They have an interest in the people who follow our organization. So share your client base and your objectives.

Businesses also want to look good to their employees and their customers. If they can be associated with you, that can help with employee morale or with their customer constituents, and that’s really positive. If you have a really positive reputation in your community or across the country, and that plays well with their constituency, that can help them too.

Steven Shattuck: Cool. Jane is wondering, “If you’re starting from scratch and need to get in the door with a company, which department would you typically reach out to for that initial contact?”

Rebecca Davis: Great question. First of all, I look to see if I have a personal connection. If there’s a board member who has a connection with somebody in finance, I would start with the person in finance I know and ask if they can open a door for me. If I don’t have a personal connection, I go to marketing. Marketing controls the dollars most of the time for this sort of thing and makes most of these decisions. If I can’t get anywhere with marketing, I usually go to HR.

Steven Shattuck: Makes sense. Tess is wondering, “Is there any strategy for amping up sponsors to higher-level sponsorships, maybe for their anniversary year or the second or third year they’ve supported you? What about upgrading sponsors who already support you?”

Rebecca Davis: That is where making sure . . . just like with donors, you’re treating the relationship personally, and you’re actually going to see someone. I’m working with one client right now where we’re starting a sponsorship campaign for an annual event. This client is new, and we’ve never worked with them before. The board president said something to me about emailing or mailing out the sponsorship solicitations. I said I’d really like to talk to somebody, and if possible, I like to see them face-to-face. It’s the same principle as with individual giving. If you can get face-to-face, you’re going to get better results.

I want to build a relationship with sponsors. I want to know somebody. After two or three years, I want to be able to say, “This is great.” I want to have had the kind of relationship where each year we’ve talked about whether their expectations were met, what they wanted to get out of it, and whether they got it. Then, after I know they’ve had a good experience for a couple of years, I want to say, “Look, I’ve been thinking about you, and I know you had this fantastic anniversary this year. I was thinking let’s do something special. I have some ideas. Let’s brainstorm.” Pitch some ideas to them, listen to what they pitch back, and then brainstorm together. See if you can come up with some special ideas and special pricing to take it to a new level that works for you and works for them.

Steven Shattuck: Cool. Speaking of pricing, here’s a question from Laura. She works for a very small organization and is wondering how to first figure out the sizes of the sponsorships, in other words, defining those levels. What advice do you have for Laura for defining those sponsorship levels for the first time?

Rebecca Davis: That is where I would start with market research. Look at what organizations in your area are doing. I recently did this for a nonprofit in a small community that was running a golf tournament. I pulled 13 different golf tournament sponsorship proposals from 13 other organizations in that community and reviewed their levels. What do they offer at each level? What do they price those levels at? Then I looked at what I felt the organization I was working for could price their levels at, and what they should offer.

I wanted to push it as far as I could, but I didn’t want to push so far that we were much more expensive than everybody else or didn’t offer competitive benefits. I wanted our benefits to be competitive, but I also wanted our dollars to be as high as possible without pricing ourselves out of the market. So I would take a look at your market.

Steven Shattuck: Makes sense. We probably have time for one last question, and I know we didn’t get to all of them. Rebecca, would you be willing to take some questions over email?

Rebecca Davis: Sure, sure, sure.

Steven Shattuck: While we do this last question, I’ll put your contact information back up on the screen. This question is from Jodie. Jodie has two events, one in the spring and one in the fall. What do you think about asking the same companies to sponsor both events? Would that be taboo, or would you ask for one and not the other? What do you think?

Rebecca Davis: I ask the same company all the time. If they’re interested and willing, yay. I would not hesitate. I would be sure to thank them profusely, tell them how much we appreciate their incredible support, and tell them how glad we are that they’re willing to support all of our events. I’d also consider offering them a package or some additional perks because they’re such a phenomenal supporter. You don’t want to start losing money, but they really are a phenomenal supporter if they’re willing to do both events. So see what you can do for them and show them the love.

Steven Shattuck: Yeah, why not.

Rebecca Davis: Yeah.

Steven Shattuck: Rebecca, this is really awesome having you. I learned a lot, and I hope everyone else did. Quite a few people were listening in, so thank you to all of you for taking an hour out of your day to hang with us. Rebecca, we’d like to have you back next year, hopefully.

Rebecca Davis: Thank you so much. It was great, and again, I welcome questions anytime.

Steven Shattuck: Cool. I’ll be sending out the slides as well as the recording of this whole presentation a little later on, so look for an email from me. We’d love to see you again. There’s lots more educational content on Bloomerang’s website, so check out our resources section. We do these webinars every Thursday, and we’ve got a couple more here in April with some cool topics coming up. Next week, one week from today, we’re going to talk about getting your board on board with fundraising. Two weeks from today, we’re going to talk about direct mail appeals and how to write them, and how to tell your stories a little better. Really cool topics, so sign up for one of those if they look interesting.

Joy, send me an email about the question you just sent over, and if you have any more questions, you can always email me. And please do email Rebecca if we didn’t get to your question. I know we just ran out of time, so sorry about that. But we’d love to see you again. We’ll call it a day there. Thanks for hanging out with us for an hour or so, and hopefully we’ll talk to you next week. Bye now.