When the global economy stopped sputtering and tumbled into a full-blown recession, the sponsorship industry took its biggest hit in my 24-year career.

• Some sponsors stopped all new investments.
• Some sponsors dropped every sponsorship they could.
• Some sponsors dropped every sponsorship they should have dropped years ago.
• Some sponsors decided to go “stealth”, underplaying their investments so as not to look ostentatious.
• Some sponsors halted, or at least minimised, leverage spending.
• Some sponsors re-evaluated everything and started fresh.
• Some sponsors stayed the course.

Although I’m a bigger fan of some of these strategies than others, whatever your company decided to do, I’m sure it was driven by some combination of necessity and politics.

The good news is that there is definitely a bright light and some breathing space opening up on the industry again. In some parts of the world, the economy is making a recovery and sponsorship is going right along with it. In others, the recovery of our industry seems to be  running counter to predictions by chief economists – perhaps spurred on by an acceptance of a new reality and a realisation of the value of sponsorship to a brand in good times and bad.

Whatever the impetus in your part of the world or your company, industry-wide, there is a palpable shift out of “holy crap”-mode and back into sponsor-mode.

If your company is in that category – as so many are – how you manage this transition will make the difference between going back to business-as-usual, or transitioning to the next stage – to best-in-class sponsorship.

When I thought about this transition through the recovery of our industry (and, we hope, the world economy), I thought about the 12 Steps of Recovery, made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous and mirrored by so many other recovery programs. They are sensible, ordered steps – meaningful, practical, not so huge as to be daunting, and focused both on the internal drivers and external impacts. It is the perfect approach for change within a complex system.

So with a reverent nod to all that those recovery organisations have accomplished, I have created a 12 Step Guide to the Recovery for Corporate Sponsors.

1. Thank the slowdown

We all have habits – good ones and bad. Sponsors, particularly, have a lot of bad habits. There are sponsors who haven’t changed their approach in a decade or more, sponsors who renew the same sponsorships year after year, and sponsors who tick the same boxes for every leverage program. Some habits are great – exercising, flossing, inbox cleanouts – but in sponsorship, not so much.

So, here we have the biggest crisis our industry has ever faced. It’s stopped a lot of us doing what we have been doing, in the ways we have been doing it for so long. It’s given us the chance to reassess, the chance for some perspective, the space to make a choice on how we start moving forward again. That’s a good thing.

2. Don’t rush it

You may have dropped some sponsorships early on in the GFC and now you’ve been handed some of your budget back. You’re probably thinking, “woo-hoo, I can spend again!”

Not so fast, buddy. Sponsorship is not a smart impulse buy, and if you rush into it, you will likely end up with a portfolio that has the same issues and deficiencies that you had before the slowdown.

Instead, let’s try to be smarter. Remember that perspective that the slowdown has provided? Use it. Do not spend one penny – do not renew one sponsorship – until you are sure that your general approach and strategy are in line with your target market and brand needs, which brings me to…

3. Get back to basics

Remember why you do sponsorship to begin with. That list should be exactly the same list as for your overall marketing plan and really only needs three things on it:

• Changing people’s perceptions of our brand – What they believe about it, what they know about it, what they think it says about them if they use our brand, whether they believe it is relevant to them or meets their needs.
• Changing people’s behaviours around our brand – Getting them to try our brand, investigate our brand, put our brand in their repertoire, getting them to be more loyal, use the brand at different times or in different ways, extend their relationship with our brand, or advocate it to others.
• Deepen our relationship with our target markets – Demonstrate our understanding of them, our respect for them, that we listen to them, and how much we value our relationship with them.

So when you strip it back to basics, you need to be absolutely clear for every sponsorship, which of your target markets each sponsorship is most relevant to, what perceptions you are trying to change, what behaviours you are trying to change, and how you will use that sponsorship to add real value to your relationship with them. In every case, the answers will be some subset of your overall marketing objectives and target markets.

Related blog: The myth of “sponsorship objectives” and why sponsorship is like sculpture

Related white paper: Last Generation Sponsorship

4. Focus on what is most important

There are so many options – so many facets – in corporate sponsorship, that it is easy to lose track of what is most important, in favour of what’s biggest and loudest.

If you’ve gone back to basics (see above), getting that focal point right becomes a lot easier, and it boils down to a realignment of priorities. Your priorities for sponsorship should be in this order:

1. Meeting target market needs
2. Getting internal buy-in
3. Meeting brand needs

This is not for a second saying that brand needs are unimportant, but if you don’t put your customers first – respecting, valuing, and adding value to your relationship with them – they will not help you achieve your brand goals. As for internal buy-in, if you don’t have that, you will not be able to fully leverage your investment (see below).

Related blogs: Brand managers take heed: Brand story vs customer story, What I learned about sponsorship from my boxing coach, For maximum impact, forget the event, concentrate on the event experience

5. Find meaningful measures of success

Following on in the same vein, you need to measure what is important – again, changes in perceptions and behaviours. Measuring mechanisms will give you a picture of your reach, but will tell you nothing about what you actually accomplished. I suggest you have a look at the free video tutorial I’ve done called “Sponsorship Measurement Basics in About 10 Minutes” on the Power Sponsorship YouTube Channel.

Related video tutorial: Sponsorship Measurement Basics in About 10 Minutes

6. Remember, you are not alone (nor should you be)

The best sponsors don’t “support” sponsorship with a lot of incremental spend. Instead, they use it as a catalyst to make money they are already spending more effective. This approach can be a huge money-saver, while increasing effectiveness, but it can’t happen if you don’t have the buy-in from your colleagues. HR won’t implement a team-building program around a charitable investment unless they understand it and are involved in the planning. Your social media team won’t incorporate a team sponsorship in their strategy unless they are part of the planning process. The list goes on and on.

If you run a sponsorship program, your job does not revolve around implementing leverage plans and measuring results. Your job revolves around organising and supporting the integration of sponsorships across many other business units and helping them to measure their results against their accepted benchmarks. You’re an internal consultant, not the Lone Ranger.

7. Don’t overfund leverage

Following on from point 6, if you use sponsorship as a catalyst, your incremental leverage costs should drop to around 10-20% of the sponsorship fee. Depending on the level of incremental spend you are making now – often cited as between 100-200% of the amount spent on fees – this could be a huge savings.

There is always the exception that makes the rule. If you’re sponsoring some huge, quadrennial event, yes, you should be war-chesting some incremental cash. In that case, you may well have invested in a platform with scope and value that outstrips your current marketing activities. Make the most of it. Spend strategically, but fund it so that you leave no leverage opportunity unrealised.

8. Make it a policy to ambush up (when possible)

If you are committed to thorough, creative, meaningful leverage, you don’t need the biggest, most visible sponsorship in the world to accomplish your goals. Invest in the lowest level sponsorship you can that will provide you with the benefits you need to do something amazing, then leverage it to the hilt, making yourself look like a much bigger sponsor than you really are – a technique called “ambushing up”.

The biggest trick to this is to negotiate for exactly the benefits you need and leave the other, extraneous benefits out – especially if those extraneous benefits are in limited supply. For instance, if what you need is access to a bunch of IP for a social media campaign, negotiate for that, not 100 tickets to every game. It’s easy for them to provide IP, but tickets cost them the cash they could make by selling to someone else. Massively visible sponsorships are very expensive, but you don’t need your logo in a stadium 100 times to add value to your relationship with your target markets, so go for minimal exposure, but the exact benefits you need to make your target markets feel understood and appreciated.

Related blog: Ambush marketing: In praise of ambushing up

9. Respect the people you care about

If you care about your target markets (and you should), if you want them to love your brand, if you want them to advocate your brand to others, DO NOT disrespect their event experience.

They went to the game to watch the game, not your flipping electronic signage right next to the field. They watch the game on TV to see the game, not to have their view obscured by the [insert sponsor logo here] meaningless statistics brigade. Don’t change the game they love, don’t get in the way, don’t try to distract them when they’re trying to pay attention to the thing they really came for, don’t turn their event into a travesty. If you do, they’ll remember you, but they won’t like you.

Best practice sponsorship is win-win-win, with the third “win” being the target market. If you put your corporate ego or tramp all over their event experience with your “brand experience”, you are making the very people you care about lose.

Related blog: Pet Peeve #228: Disrespectful sponsorship

10. Educate your partners

Before you go spending all of that newfound or newly freed-up cash on sponsorship fees, you should consider making a small investment in improving the sophistication level of your partners.

Sponsorship is a good example of the “weakest link” proposition. The target market is always the strongest link. They know what they want and they hold most of the power in the win-win-win equation. When it comes to sponsors and sponsorship seekers, well… either one can be the weakest. Let’s assume that you are the sponsor and your approach is strong and based on best-practice principles, but you’ve got some partners who are still stuck in the levels/packages mentality, or they base your relationship on their need, or they still think logos-on-stuff equates to sponsor value. Whatever the case, spending a little bit of time and money elevating their approach will make your results increase dramatically, and your headaches reduce by an equal measure.

Cards on the table, I am hired by sponsors to do this kind of training a lot, and while I am not encouraging you to hire me, I can tell you firsthand that feedback from my clients about the increase in the quality of their relationships – the creativity, flexibility, responsiveness, and results – has been fantastic across the board. Whether your hire someone or handle it yourself, it will be worth it.

11. Get the right professional help

Sponsorship is full of experts who want to help you for a fee. But you need to be absolutely sure you are hiring the best person or company for the job.

For instance, I do pointy-end, strategic work, like strategy development, portfolio audits, in-house training, etc. I am not the person you want to design and run your high-end hospitality experience. I get the vapours just thinking about it!

Seriously, if you need help with your strategy work, hire the very best sponsorship strategist you can find – this is not a job for your ad agency, promotions agency, or event planner, no matter how good they may be. If you want an event run to a standard that blows your guests away, hire an event company with a track record of amazing events. Don’t hire a strategist, who won’t have a clue how to organise something like that and would outsource it (and charge you an arm and a leg) anyway. Don’t hire a promotions agency or PR company. And don’t hire a conference organiser, who may be outstanding at herding 400 people between breakout sessions and cocktail parties, but wouldn’t have a clue how to make a white marquee look like an opulent Bedouin tent or get Heidi Klum or Andy Roddick to rock up at your event.

It is, as we say in Australia, horses for courses.

Related blog: How and when to hire a sponsorship consultant (and when to go it alone)

12. Don’t apologise

Unlike the 12 Steps in most recovery programs, I don’t want you to apologise.

I know there is a crisis on, and I know a lot of people (and politicians) seem to categorise sponsorship as some kind of corporate luxury spend. This is particularly true with the automotive and banking industries, who have been recipients of government bailout money and are now, in some cases, partly owned by government.

Here’s the thing, if it’s working for you – providing your company with measurable marketing returns – taking an apologetic stance is unnecessary and unwise. Choose your sponsorships well, leverage them thoroughly, measure the results, and throughout the process, be as transparent as you can possibly be about the rationale for this type of investment and the results it provides.

If, on the other hand, you’ve been doing sponsorship in a very unstrategic way and plan to continue this form, then you should definitely apologise.

Related blog: Dear Senator Kerry, corporate sponsorship is NOT a waste of money… or is it?

So, there it is… 12 Steps: A sponsor’s guide to the recovery. I hope this has been helpful and provided some insight about how you can use this period of transition to create a positive change in your sponsorship program, in practical, doable pieces.

If you’ve been one of the lucky few sponsors who have not had to big, abrupt changes to your sponsorship program, these steps may not apply. Then again, taking the time to reassess and fine tune is never a bad idea.

Good luck to you all!