How to Develop a Sponsorship Structure for Your Event
When I worked for the Alzheimer’s Association, one of my biggest hurdles was embracing the role of fundraiser. With a psychology background, I was a program director first – given a choice, I would have loved to spend all of my time working directly with families dealing with Alzheimer’s disease and developing programs and services to help them.
There was one problem: I was the only employee at the Southern Utah Regional Office, and if I wanted to provide programs and services, I needed money to do it. When faced with this reality, I decided to embrace my role as a fundraiser and jump in with both feet.
Organizing the annual Memory Walk entailed many things, but one of the most daunting was securing sponsorships for the event. However, after a couple of years, my committee and I developed a system that generated progressively more sponsorships each year. First, we needed to develop a sponsorship structure. Here are two steps to determining a structure that’s right for your event:
Decide on sponsorship levels. For example, you could offer sponsorship opportunities at levels of $100, $500, $1000, and $3000+. Each level should have a name, such as Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. You can also come up with more creative names for sponsorship levels depending on your cause.
Sponsorship levels should reflect the economic and social characteristics of your community. More affluent areas may warrant higher sponsorship levels, while economically depressed regions will obviously not be able to give as much. Get input from your planning committee about sponsorship levels that are most appropriate to your community.
Offer benefits for each sponsorship level. Businesses agree to sponsor events not only because they care about the cause; they also become sponsors in order to gain publicity. Be sure to offer sponsorship benefits that provide businesses with increasing visibility as sponsorship levels go up. For instance, a Bronze sponsor might have its logo appear on event banners, while a Silver sponsor could have its logo appear on both banners and t-shirts. Gold sponsors would enjoy these benefits as well as recognition in all press releases; Platinum sponsors could receive all of the previous benefits plus a plaque to display in their place of business.
Again, sponsorship benefits will vary depending on your community. Seek input from your planning committee about what kinds of recognition local businesses want in order to make sponsoring your event more attractive.
In my next blog, I’ll provide tips for approaching businesses with your sponsorship structure. But first, I’d love to hear how you’ve developed your own sponsorship levels and benefits. Post a comment to this blog, or start a new discussion in the forum.
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It also helps to provide the sponsor with more than just logo placement and signage. You need to connect the sponsor to your market with active promotions.
If a sponsor pays you for signage and gets nothing out of it, you’ve benefited, but the sponsor hasn’t. That’s a bad deal for the sponsor.
Thanks, David! That’s a great point. I’d love to hear about active promotions people have offered that were especially beneficial to sponsors.