I meet a lot of sponsors, and something that strikes me with alarming frequency is the fact that so many of them are quite aware of what best practice sponsorship is about, and the benefits of doing it, but haven’t taken any steps to elevate their sponsorship approach to that level.

Why would so many sponsors bother to talk such a good game, when they have no apparent interest in playing it? What is stopping them from taking the steps necessary to benefit their brand using a more strategic approach? The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it’s fear. Below, I’ve outlined the five biggest fears I see all the time.

You’re afraid it will be more work

You’re right. Getting sponsorship to really fly does require a lot of work. The good news is that best practice sponsorship spreads that load to the most sensible people, so your workload is likely to be different, but not bigger.

Here’s the thing, sponsorship does not work in a vacuum. To get the most out of it, it should be used as a catalyst – integrated across your other marketing and business activities. That means, you will be working with decision-makers from across your company and, newsflash, they are all better at their jobs than you are.

Got a sponsorship with a social media angle? Work with your in-house (or contracted) expert to develop the plan and then – yay! – they implement it. Got an employee angle? That’s where the employee experts, HR, come in. Sales? Your sales team is much better placed to develop the promotions and get retail buy-in than you are. The list goes on and on.

If you do sponsorship right, your job changes from “doer” to “wrangler”, as you manage the process through the different departments. And because those departments are already experts, they will be able to accomplish a lot and do it both expertly and efficiently.

You’re afraid of the higher bar

What if you make some changes and, lo and behold, they actually work? Suddenly the bar may be raised on everything you do!

While some corporate managers relish in meeting higher expectations, not everyone is in that category. Let’s face it, some would rather coast.

The thing about best practice sponsorship is that once someone – read: your boss – sees how smart, effective, and creative it is, they will become best practice true believers and you will be a star. And yes, that means higher expectations.

The good news is that once you know how to construct a best practice sponsorship leverage and measurement program, it is easy to replicate the process for the rest of your portfolio. It’s creative, it’s fun, and so very gratifying. Thinking that you shouldn’t make the first jump because the bar will eventually go up is silly and self-defeating.

You’re afraid that if you take a different approach, it will make you look like you were dumb before

I see this one a lot. A sponsorship manager or team wants to make a change, but they don’t want to admit to colleagues and bosses that they had it wrong – or at least not right – before.

Here’s the good news: You have a window of opportunity. Best practice sponsorship is not so common that you will look like you were late to the party. It is new enough that you can say you’ve been doing some research on global best practice and you want to overhaul the approach. There is absolutely no shame in that, so take ownership and lead the process. Be the spearhead. You’ll look like a visionary.

You’re afraid the sell-in will be tough

This is a valid fear. Sometimes corporate cultures just don’t readily embrace change and knowing you have to fight inertia is enough to stymie any attempts at progress.

Education is your friend. Distribute white papers (“Last Generation Sponsorship” is a great start). Involve colleagues in leverage brainstorms. The fastest thing you can do, however, is to host some in-house training with someone who really knows best practice sponsorship and how to teach it. Show your colleagues the light and they will see the possibilities for your own brands.

You’re afraid the perks will dry up

Sponsorship managers – particularly at bigger companies – are on a pretty good wicket. They get invited to a lot of events and get a lot of tickets that mere mortals dream about. It’s so good, that it is perfectly understandable that you don’t want to change anything, just in case you miss out.

It won’t happen. There is every chance that your portfolio may change to better reflect brand and target market needs, but you’re still going to get all the good invitations. As long as you still have a hand in decisions, you will not miss out.

There you go. Five fears you really don’t need to have. There are no excuses. Get out there and embrace best practice – for your brands, your career, and yourself. You won’t regret it.

People are afraid of change. At least that’s the sense I get when talking about best practice sponsorship. It is all so new and different that people assume it will be difficult.

It’s not actually difficult, but I do get that it can look daunting to start. For those people who want to do sponsorship better, but want to take baby steps, I’ve created this guide.

Step 1

You need to start changing your thinking, so some light reading is your first step. There is tons of content on this site, but to give you an easily digestible start, I recommend these two white papers:

• Last Generation Sponsorship
• Sponsorship in a Scary Economy

Step 2

You’re realising that you could be doing better, but not sure where to start. Here are a few blogs that outline where most sponsorship seekers get it wrong – helping you to put some dynamite under those old habits – and how to do it right.

• How Do I Get Sponsorship for My Event?
• The Problem with Sponsorship Levels
• Five Things a Sponsorship Seeker Must Bring to a Sponsor Meeting

Bonus reading for non-profits:

• Non-Profits, Watch Your (Sponsorship) Language!
• Overheard: The World’s Worst Sponsorship Advice for Non-Profits

Step 3

You’re starting to get hungry to put some of this into practice, so you need to equip yourself.

Order The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3^rd Edition.

While you’re waiting for it to arrive, start following the blogs of these very smart people, below. Note, I have left out a number of big names who do blog, but aren’t all that insightful, taking an approach something like, “I’d like to bring your attention to this issue. It sure is a big issue and I recommend you keep it in mind. The end.”

• Partnership Activation Blog by Brian Gainor – http://www.partnershipactivation.com
• Sponsorship Blog by Linda Antonidis – http://sponsorshipblog.com/
• The Business of Sports Blog by Russell Scibetti – http://www.thebusinessofsports.com/
• Culture Scout Blog by Patricia Martin – http://blog.patricia-martin.com
• Chris Reed on Partnership Marketing – http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/chrisreed/default.aspx
• SponsorPark’s blog – http://www.sponsorpark.com/blog/
• Kim Skildum-Reid’s Corporate Sponsorship Blog (yes, that’s my blog) – http://blog.powersponsorship.com

If you’re on Twitter, you can start following some of the best thinkers in sponsorship, sports marketing, and fundraising. I’ve compiled a list of my favourites you can check out:

http://twitter.com/KimSkildumReid/sponsorship

Step 4

The book still hasn’t arrived, but you want to get going.

Download the Generic Inventory – a big list of all of the creative benefits you can offer, but probably haven’t thought of. Spend 30 minutes customising it for your organisation.

If you’re relatively new to marketing and sponsorship, you should also download “Cheat Sheet: Marketing Terms a Sponsorship Seeker Must Know”, so you can start talking the language.

Finally, get a library card. You heard me right – you need a library card. Why? So you can avail yourself of the best free resource for business information on the planet: ABI/Inform Full-Text Online.

You can enter – Google-style – keywords and it will search the full text of articles on thousands of business publications around the world and bring you back the whole articles. You can mark the ones that are interesting to you and e-mail them to yourself. The kind of things you will find:

• Examples of best practice sponsorship
• Examples of interesting, out-of-the-box partnerships
• Examples of interesting, out-of-the-box sponsorship benefits
• Precedent to add weight to that great sponsorship idea you have
• Background on how other sponsors use their sponsorships of art galleries/festivals/whatever
• Background on what multinational sponsors do in other countries (you’ll make yourself look really smart if you do this!)

The kicker is that mostly only university and major public libraries have a license to this. The good news is that you should be able to get a library card and pin number to remotely log into the online materials from your office. That’s what I do with the State Library of NSW. Just call and ask your closest major library about the process to get a card and pin number because you want to access ProQuest databases from home (ABI/Inform is a ProQuest service). Note, do say “home”, not “work”.

Step 5

The book has arrived! Go straight to the section on Sales. Read it, take notes, and pick a couple of your current sponsors coming up to renewal that you will try out the techniques on. What techniques? Distilling it down to the most important sales basics:

• Fill out the Sponsor Information Checklist as much as you can.
• Contact your sponsor and request a meeting. Tell them that you are going to be taking a new approach and want to ensure you understand exactly what they are trying to achieve, so you can create something really effective for them. In that meeting, fine tune your Sponsor Information Checklist.
• Get some colleagues together and go through the leverage brainstorm process to get some great ideas to build your sponsorship around.

Step 6

Okay, so you’ve got a couple of receptive sponsors itching for your great new ideas, but you don’t know how to package them.

First off, start with the sponsorship proposal template in The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3^rd Edition. Be absolutely sure to customise it, so it looks like your organisation, not the generic version you get in the book. Dress it up, include pictures, make it sexy.

This blog will be very helpful in getting you to the right price:

• Sponsorship Pricing Basics

And there is this YouTube tutorial:

Sponsorship Proposal Basics in About 10 Minutes

You’re on your own

If you follow all of these little baby steps, and use a couple of your current sponsors as guinea pigs, you will start to get feedback that will tell you this approach is what sponsors are hungry for. It will start to feel like the obvious and natural way to go about sponsorship and you will start devouring everything you can about the whole process.

Once that happens, you don’t need baby steps anymore. You’re starting to see that it works and will be flying!

If you’re anything like me, you love to see a plan come together – all the pieces falling into place to form a seamless, cohesive whole. I get all a-tingle just thinking about it.

Sponsors do this all the time. They plan and execute leverage strategies that are things of beauty. But as glorious as it is to have a “perfect” leverage plan in place – and as a bit of a perfectionist, it pains me to tell you this – your leverage will work better if you leave a few holes and some of the edges ragged.

The first reason you want to somewhat under-produce your leverage program is that marketing that looks too slick, too manufactured, pushes the cynicism button for consumers. Think about it: You have invested in the privilege to connect with your target markets through something they already care about, and then you opt for slick , often highly brand-centric, commercialism. It’s a turn-off. The good news is that the alternative works a lot better.

My favourite reason to under-produce is that it leaves space for the target markets. Let them fill in the blanks, create the content, provide input and feedback. In short, allow the consumers to be the architects, not only of their event experience, but of their brand experience around that event.

A great example of this is how Orange leverages their major sponsorship of the Glastonbury Festival. Their leverage plan is stuff of legend, and you really need to check out their micro-site to appreciate it. While you’re there, however, take a good look at how much of the content of that site is generated by their customers and music fans. They don’t overly stage-manage the content. Instead, they showcase the passion of music fans in all its imperfect glory. When they combine that willingness to share the platform with their customers and music fans with the rest of their creative, responsive leverage plan, the put their brand in the unassailable position of both adding real value to, and aligning with, their target markets.

The good news for sponsors is that social media has made sharing the platform much easier, but if you’re going to do it, you actually do have to share. Creating a Facebook page is all well and good, but if you aren’t showcasing fan comments on your main page, or delete any negative comments, you’re missing the point. Creating a sponsorship-driven Twitter account is fantastic, unless all you do is post outbound marketing messages and never respond to anyone.

When it comes right down to it, as a sponsor, you should not be providing an experience, but sharing it with your target markets. The idea of being a “brand hero” is self-centred and (thankfully) dying. Instead, be a brand fan. Jump into the experience with your target markets. Revel in it. Share it. Reap the benefits.

It started with a few dozen pretty women in orange mini-dresses with no apparent branding attending the Netherlands’ first round match. “Dutch supporters”, they said. FIFA correctly thought otherwise, then did just about the stupidest thing they could have done.

What FIFA should have done…

• Get their own megalomania under control.
• Roll their eyes at the lame attempt to “ambush” the World Cup with a low-impact, first-generation visibility grab.
• Realise that 36 pretty girls sitting together in orange dresses is not going to harm the sponsor, particularly if they had done a good job of leveraging their massive investment. (It was Budweiser, but how many of you knew that?)
• Inform the broadcaster not to dwell on them.

If they really wanted to be hard, they could also have informed the women that if they returned in that or a similar get-up, they would not be allowed entry to future games.

What FIFA actually did…

• Eject the women, hold and question them for four hours.
• Arrest the ringleaders in contravention of anti-ambush legislation.
• Make Bavaria Beer and their models a global phenomenon.

Good on you, FIFA! You’ve turned an inconsequential, cosmetic ambush into the biggest sponsorship story of the World Cup.

Actually, FIFA’s reaction was so predictable (as are all the various World Cup organisers and the IOC) that Bavaria was probably banking on FIFA to do all the heavy lifting for them! All the while, Nike is running rampant with viral video that actually is creating marketing value for them and reducing the effectiveness of Adidas’ sponsorship.

Wake up, organisers! It’s time to stop dwelling on the inconsequential and start tackling the big issues in ambush marketing. When the ICC (Cricket’s global ruling body) started going through fans’ coolers and dumping out their Coca-Colas, it made Cricket World Cup sponsor, Pepsi, look like a spoil sport. When organisers of major events make fans turn their T-shirts inside out, it makes both the organisers and the sponsors look petty and mean.

Why do organisers do this? Because at least it looks like they’re doing something. What they’re not doing, however, is stopping the kind of ambush that hurts their sponsors. To do that would require them to admit that they can’t control it, tell their sponsors that great leverage is their best defence, and to work and be flexible with those sponsors to find leverage ideas that will work across the entire event experience.

Do I think this will ever happen? No, because being pedantic, sabre-rattlers is easier.

I’ve recently been involved in a lively discussion on LinkedIn about the value of online sponsorship submission forms. The response has been divided, to say the least.

Some people advocate their use, citing two main reasons:

1. It allows for an apples-to-apples comparison of properties.
2. It is a faster way of vetting sponsorships than going through stacks of unsolicited proposals and request letters.

I am not a fan of these forms in any way, although I can understand why they have appeal. On the surface, it absolutely looks like a time-saver and an objective assessment tool. If you look a bit deeper, however, there are some fatal flaws in this premise.

Sponsorships are not apples

As for making apples-to-apples comparisons, every sponsorship is so different, it would be impossible to compare them unless distilled into the most basic of commodities. How much exposure, tickets, hospitality, etc for how much money? Sponsorship simply isn’t a commodity industry, it’s a creative ideas industry. Imagine if ad agencies had to pitch for business using an online form!

Sponsorship comes in all shapes and sizes, all degrees of engagement and creativity. The huge sponsorship will tens of millions of impressions may look good on a form, but offer very little real value against the objectives of a mature brand. They may be totally disengaged. They may be a nightmare to work with. You can also make enormous returns from small sponsorships that are leveraged creatively, but for a sponsor to see that potential, the property needs to be able to showcase the creative leverage ideas that will create that return. Some of the least “sexy” sponsorships could provide the best return, and vice versa. None of that – positive or negative – will come out in a form.

The value isn’t in what you get, it’s what you do with it

When you invest in sponsorship, you are investing in opportunity. It is leverage (aka “activation”) that provides the results. The best sponsorship seekers are providing those creative ideas for leverage in their proposals, making it very easy for a sponsor to see how they can make it work for their brands.

Old school sponsorship seekers tell sponsors what they’re about, list the benefits, and in effect, say “you figure it out”. That “figuring out” of what’s in it for you takes a long time, but that’s exactly what sponsors set themselves up for when they use sponsorship submission forms.

If you really want to figure out which of those proposals submitted through a form will work for your brand, you need to go through the process of idea development. This takes a lot more time than reviewing the ideas that great properties will provide to you, if you give them the chance. And if a sponsor isn’t prepared to go through the process of “how could we make this work for our brand”, then they are making decisions about who to sponsor or further consider and who not to based on least common denominator mechanisms.

My recommendation: Sponsorship guidelines

Rather than creating walls, how about sponsors  just being more open and specific about your needs. And no, including the line “we only select sponsorships which meet out needs” does not count. You have to tell the sponsorship seekers what you need.

• Create a set of sponsorship guidelines and make it really easy for seekers to get them.
• Put them online, but don’t bury them six links deep on your website.
• Ensure your voicemail says, “if you want to submit a proposal, please understand we only consider properties that meet our needs, as outlined in the sponsorship guidelines you can find xyz”.
• Ensure every point of entry for sponsorship requests has access to electronic copy. This includes brand managers, regional managers, sales managers, and senior executives (who often say “yes” just so they don’t have to say “no” – this gives them an out).
• Ensure your switchboard knows that if someone calls asking to “speak to someone about sponsorship”, they should direct them to your sponsorship guidelines online.
• Finally, make it absolutely clear you’re serious. The first sign a proposal doesn’t comply, send an email telling them that the proposal wasn’t compliant and if they want to be considered, they need to follow your sponsorship guidelines.

Anecdotally, the number of proposals you get will drop by around 60-75% and the quality of those proposals will rise dramatically. They will be more comprehensive, creative, and objective-driven. I get a lot of love letters from sponsors about how sponsorship guidelines have made their lives easier.

Get your free, comprehensive sponsorship guidelines template.

If you use a template as a starting point, creating sponsorship guidelines takes maybe an hour. You will probably have to get sign-off, which can take a bit of time and fine-tuning, but my experience is that you could have them on your website and in the hands of all of your proposal touch points (electronically), such as brand management, local and regional management, senior managements (usually their assistants), and more – within about two weeks.

Even smaller sponsors can benefit from having good sponsorship guidelines. They may not have the massive workload that comes along with hundreds or thousands of proposals a month, but they still want good proposals that are about their needs. I know many smaller and mid-sized companies that are very happy with the reduction in workload, and especially the higher quality of proposals, that they get. I even know of several companies that have guidelines for smaller sponsorships (eg, for investments under $2000) that are not as demanding as their guidelines for larger sponsorships, but still require a degree of strategic benefits and ideas.

What about sponsorship seekers?

My strong advice to sponsorship seekers is to ignore those forms and go straight to the brand manager. Don’t pitch. Contact them having done your homework and seek to fill in the blanks so you can create a customised, creative proposal with great ideas for them to leverage. If they tell you that you have to submit via the form, they have just told you “no” and basically didn’t want to do it themselves. Go ahead and submit, but the ultimate decision will rest with the brand manager, and if s/he’s just given you the flick, it’s highly unlikely to be “yes”.

For more on reading the signs, I recommend my blog, “Six Signs a Sponsor Is Just Not That into You”.

For the whole process of offer development and sales, I suggest my book, The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3rd Edition.

The upshot

The upshot for all concerned is that sponsorship submission forms are a false economy. They work only in an environment that rewards old school thinking and constrain the creative process that is part and parcel with gaining the best returns at the least possible spend.