This industry is full of little white lies. Sponsors and sponsorship seekers alike are guilty of telling them – some because you want to be nice, others to deflect blame. Whatever the reason, it’s not helping anyone. So, consider this your primer on the real meaning behind some of the industry’s most common little white lies.

THE LIE “We aren’t renewing because we didn’t get a good return”

THE TRUTH: “We leveraged and/or selected the sponsorship so poorly that we didn’t get a good return”

THE FIX: Stop passing the buck and take responsibility for it going wrong. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to learn from it and do it better next time.

It’s not a sponsorship seeker’s job to get you a return. It’s their job to provide you with the raw materials – the benefits and target markets – so that you can leverage it to get a good return. If you selected poorly, that’s not their fault. If you agreed to a package with benefits that aren’t appropriate to your needs, that’s not their fault. And if you didn’t leverage well, that is also not their fault.

But I see sponsors who keep moving from one inappropriate or poorly leveraged sponsorship to another, all the while blaming the sponsee for it not performing. Until they own up to their own failings, they are destined to stay on that same path and never become an effective sponsor.

I am not saying for one second that you shouldn’t exit a sponsorship that isn’t right for your brand. You may also want to exit a sponsorship that has been under-leveraged (and thus under-performing) for so long that it no longer has internal buy-in. What I don’t want you to do is to blame the sponsee if it wasn’t their fault.

THE LIE: “All our funds are currently committed”

THE TRUTH: “Your proposal wasn’t good enough for us to consider allocating funds to it”

THE FIX: Raise your game. Pure and simple, you either approached a brand that wasn’t right for your event or what you offered was not compelling to them. Fortunately for you, most sponsorship proposals would fall into this category, which means that if you learn how to target sponsors more accurately and create offers that are both creative and customised to each sponsors’ needs, your proposals will rise to the top of the stack. There is never any guarantee of a “yes”, but skilling up will shorten your odds considerably.

As a start, you may want to get your hands on The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3^rd Edition, which will take you through the whole process of best practice sponsorship. Then roll up your sleeves and prepare to take a whole new approach.

THE LIE: “This event has broad general appeal”

THE TRUTH: “We haven’t bothered to do market research”

THE FIX: Do market research. For every event (program, charity, etc), there is a certain group of people we’ll call “true believers”. They will attend, support you, or whatever – they just need to know where and when. There is also a group – probably a lot larger – who will never, ever attend, donate, etc. These are your “nevers”. The people you will market the event to will be the ones in between – the ones who haven’t made up their minds yet, as marketing is really about influencing decisions and perceptions.

Sponsors really need to know exactly what kind of people you will be targeting for your event and what kind of people have historically attended. You need to define various sub-groups by psychographics (who they are), not demographics (what they are). Telling a sponsor you target “women 24-39” doesn’t tell them anything about what kind of people you’re trying to get to your event. “Health-conscious fitness enthusiasts”, “busy, overworked urban mums”, and “nightclub party girls” may all fall into that age bracket, but are completely different markets – different for you and different for your sponsors.

Think about the primary motivations for people who attend your event – you should be able to think of at least three or four completely different motivations – and start your target market descriptions from there. While you’re at it, start working up a target market survey and/or focus groups to help you augment your understanding.

And remove the phrase “broad general appeal” from your vocabulary. It’s a total cop out.

THE LIE: “If you sponsor us, you will be giving back to the community”

THE TRUTH: “We can’t think of a good reason for you to sponsor us, so we’re going with ‘guilt’”

THE FIX: First off, guilt is never a good selling point. It ticks sponsors off, so you need to get off that angle quicksmart.

Second, if you’re going with the community-investment/guilt approach, compelling a sponsor to invest in the community is not the same thing as compelling them to invest in whatever you’re doing. They have a lot of options. They need to know why yours is the right one. Which brings me to…

Third, do not ever create a sponsorship offer without ensuring that there is a target market fit (we target at least some of the same markets as the sponsor), an attribute fit (our brands have a natural affinity), and that you have done your homework to understand the sponsor’s objectives and created an offer that meets those objectives (that would be your objective fit). It is only by taking that approach that you will have built an actual, defensible business case for the investment. I don’t care how good a cause yours is, sponsors have thousands of good causes they could sponsor and you need to make a real case.

THE LIE: “We got a return-on-investment of 4:1”

THE TRUTH: “The executive bean-counters want to see a dollar return, so we took a wild guess”

THE FIX: Stop taking shortcuts and learn to measure results properly.

Counting logo exposures and multiplying that times some media equivalency figure does not tell you if the sponsorship worked. Adding up the a la carte prices of various benefits and comparing it to what you paid might tell you if you got a bargain, but it won’t tell you if you got a good result. And adding up incremental sales from a sponsorship-driven promotion will give you a dollar figure, but it clearly does not reflect the entire result from a good sponsorship.

Your job as a sponsor is to change people’s perceptions and their behaviours, and in the end, that all translates to sales and money. Smart sponsors have embraced the idea of measuring multiple perception and behaviour changes, using multiple methods, to create a report that reflects the real results in whatever currency.

• Incremental sales, case commitments, new customer acquisition, etc will probably be measured in the currency of dollars
• Other sales-related measurement may be in percentages or raw numbers, such as the percent of key retailers that used the promotional merchandise and/or put our brand on special during the promotional period
• Perception changes will be measured via research and be measured in the currency of percentages – Eg, “Our ambient figure for ‘most trustworthy tyres’ is 28%, but 54% of people who attended the event rated our tyres as ‘most trustworthy’”
• Employee satisfaction changes will probably be in percentages as well, measured via surveys, employee turnover figures, etc
• Market capitalisation will be measured in dollars (this is really only pertinent for major sponsorship investments)

The list goes on and on. The basic idea is that some things can be measured in dollars, but a lot of extremely important measures really can’t, and any attempt to turn them into dollars will end up as just some meaningless, arbitrary figure.

Given all of that, how are you going to get the bean counters on board? In my experience, the key lies in getting all the various departments who are participating in the sponsorship – leveraging it – to measure the results. They do it all the time, know how to measure those things, and know how to benchmark. What’s more, those are the figures that go to the bean counters all the time, so are accepted. Involve these people in the leverage planning and measurement and you will be able to collate a report that will make any senior executive sit up and take notice.