Mikill sponsorship er, vi� �ess mj�g n�tt�ran, a samvinna a�fer�. �a� eini verksmi�ja ef a me� l�gmarksmagn af kleyfu efni af �inn g�sluma�ur ve�fj�r ert integrating sponsorship across their activities. My experience is that if you create a cross-departmental stakeholder team and get them spooled up on the principles of best practice sponsorship, you will get the buy-in to the approach that you need.

The weak link for buy-in tends to be at the senior executive level. There is something about that potent combination of not knowing how sponsorship really works, benefitting greatly from the status quo (great tickets, meeting top sportspeople, funding pet charities, etc), and a healthy corporate ego, that makes it attractive to resist any major changes in how sponsorship is done. And if your CEO or other senior executive nixes the plan, you don’t have a lot of room to move.

I have three suggestions for handling this senior executive roadblock.

• Provide a stakeholder team recommendation
• Propose a pilot program
• Sneak in some best practice

Provide a stakeholder team recommendation

Your first and most attractive option is to work with your stakeholder team on the development of the overall sponsorship strategy and any leverage plans that are big enough to catch a senior executive’s attention. This means the plan will be highly credible and clearly delivering across a number of areas of the company.

The success of this option will be largely due to your corporate culture. If your senior executives have a culture of respecting, valuing, and empowering middle management, they should be quite open to a new approach if it is signed off by key people they trust.

Propose a pilot program

If you’ve got a major sponsorship – beloved by one or more senior executives – and you want to change how it’s leveraged, you may see some resistance. In that case, you can provide a recommended course of action from the stakeholder team and include a pilot program as your Plan B.

A pilot program is a smaller version of something you want to roll out across a year, season, country, etc. For instance, you may want to do a comprehensive social media campaign around a league sponsorship or do virtual bounce-back coupons for fans, via their mobile phones.

If this is all sounding a bit wacky to your seniors, you could pilot some of your easier, lower cost, minimal infrastructure ideas – like the ones above – at one midweek game in a smaller city. There is no reason you need to put all the flashy bells and whistles on it if the point is to try it out. Add them when you get the green light to roll it out.

If you do propose a pilot program, the most important part of the equation for your senior executives is the objectives and measurement plan, which must be strategic and detailed. That way, you can all be agreed as to what will be considered a success.

Sneak in some best practice

I am a firm believer that it is better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission.

If your stakeholder team is strong, and their day-to-day operations are not being micromanaged from above, there is no reason you need to even tell your senior executives about the new approach. Instead, embark on a plan that includes the best performing, most internally popular leverage ideas from previous years, and add a number of best practice, “third win”-type leverage ideas to the mix. The senior executives won’t have lost any of the activities that they think have value, but you have the opportunity to significantly improve the returns.

On the numerous occasions when I have taken this approach with clients, all the sponsorship buzz ends up being around the last generation leverage activities, the senior executive team is delighted, and you will have a lot more freedom to do great things – and get rid of old-school thinking – in the future.

If you go all out and do something really cool with your leverage activities, be sure to submit your case study to an influential marketing or advertising publication, like Brandweek, AdAge, AdNews, etc. The kudos your company and, by association, the senior executives, will get from this kind of endorsement of your strong strategic work will definitely free you up to do more of it in the future. I’ve done this with a few clients, and even the most stubborn Managing Director starts to see the light when a few of their peers phone up congratulating them on “their” innovation!

Want more hands-on information about developing and selling-in those great leverage ideas (and managing your senior executives)? I’ve got workshops coming up in Melbourne, Stockholm, and Los Angeles. The links for more information are below.

Melbourne

• Sponsorship Seekers – 20-21 April, Sponsors – 22 April
• Click here for more information and to register for Power Sponsorship Workshops in Melbourne
• Click here to download the Australasian Power Sponsorship Workshops Tour Brochure (PDF)

Stockholm

• Sponsorship Seekers – 18 May (half-day), Sponsors – 18 May (half-day). I’m also doing a keynote on best practice sponsorship and experiential marketing and a breakout session on ambush marketing on 19 May.
• Click here for more information on Scandinavian Sponsorship & Experiential Days

Los Angeles

• Sponsorship Seekers – 25 May, Sponsors – 26 May
• Click here for more information and to register for Power Sponsorship Workshops in Los Angeles
• Click here to download the Los Angeles Workshops Brochure (PDF)

Best practice sponsorship is easy. Well, okay… maybe not easy, but it is certainly a lot more sensible and no more difficult than old school sponsorship. So, when I came upon an online discussion where one of the pundits was defending old school sponsorship as a stepping stone to learning best practice sponsorship, I was, let’s just say… befuddled.

The idea put forward was that old school thinking is the basics of sponsorship and best practice, Last Generation Sponsorship is for advanced practitioners – not smaller organisations or organisations run by volunteers. Wrong answer.

Best practice thinking is the basics of sponsorship. It’s not more difficult or more advanced, it’s simply new – the result of the increasing sophistication of the industry. Saying someone needs to understand out-of-date “basics” before learning best practice is like saying someone needs to master a Commodore 64 computer (circa 1980) before they’re ready for a Mac!

Best practice is just as simple – and far more sensible – than old-school thinking. That holds whether the sponsorship seeker is a professional or a volunteer. If you’re not prepared to go best practice, the process will be more difficult and less rewarding. It sucks the life out of people to hear “no” that often, and that’s not what you want for yourself, your staff, or your volunteers.

Moreover, smaller organisations can’t get away with worse skills than larger sponsorship seekers, as they are held to the same standard by sponsors. Sponsors make their decisions about where to invest based on many things, including the fit of the property, the sophistication and partnership-orientation of the offer, the leverage ideas incorporated in the offer, and more. Making your offer compelling enough to stand out in the sea of uncustomised proposals sponsors receive requires top quality skills, no matter what the size of the organisation.

In case you’re interested in feedback from some people – many from smaller, community organisations – who have done my workshops and moved from old school thinking to best practice, check out this link.

Power Sponsorship Workshops Delegate Feedback

The longer responses were from people I polled months after the training, so they have had time to put it into practice. The reason I thought you would be interested is that the message is so clear – best practice thinking will change your results, no matter what kind or size organisation you work for.

Not sure what comprises best practice? You may want to download my white paper, “Last Generation Sponsorship”.

Want more hands-on information and training? I’ve got workshops coming up in Melbourne, Stockholm, and Los Angeles. The links for more information are below.

Melbourne

• Sponsorship Seekers – 20-21 April, Sponsors – 22 April
• Click here for more information and to register for Power Sponsorship Workshops in Melbourne
• Click here to download the Australasian Power Sponsorship Workshops Tour Brochure (PDF)

Stockholm

• Sponsorship Seekers – 18 May (half-day), Sponsors – 18 May (half-day). I’m also doing a keynote on best practice sponsorship and experiential marketing and a breakout session on ambush marketing on 19 May.
• Click here for more information on Scandinavian Sponsorship & Experiential Days

Los Angeles

• Sponsorship Seekers – 25 May, Sponsors – 26 May
• Click here for more information and to register for Power Sponsorship Workshops in Los Angeles
• Click here to download the Los Angeles Workshops Brochure (PDF)

There has been a fair bit of chatter online about what the standard sponsorship leverage ratio should be. That is, how much incremental money should you budget for your leverage program, as a ratio to the sponsorship fee paid.

People have offered up 1:1 (spend one dollar leveraging for every dollar spent on a sponsorship fee), 2:1, and 3:1 in the discussions. If you pay attention to IEG, you’ll know they recently reported an average leverage spend of 1.4:1 in 2009. And there are plenty of that media hail big leverage spenders as being at the vanguard of sponsorship.

I disagree with all of that. Vehemently. Spending that much, incrementally, flies in the face of everything that makes sponsorship so powerful:

• It’s meaningful and resonant to your target markets.
• It is supremely flexible – like sculpture, you can make sponsorship into anything you want and out of anything you want, so long as it is structurally sound.
• It’s integrateable across all other marketing media.

Even if you’re only spending 1:1, you’re spending too much, and you’re probably doing too little.

When I started in this industry, 1:1 was being hailed as the new thing. In a sense, it was good, as it made people understand that sponsorships needed to be leveraged to provide a return. But the proportion was totally arbitrary, as is 2:1, which was the supposed answer to sponsorship clutter.

The best sponsors now spend the least amount on leverage, incrementally – 10-25%, not 100-200%. This is because they…

• Centralise sponsorship in their portfolios. It’s no longer a piece of the pie, but a catalyst that makes already budgeted marketing activities more effective.
• Work cross-departmentally, getting input from across the company before negotiation, ensuring that every department gets the benefits they need to have an appropriate platform for leverage, and integrating sponsorship across those existing activities, or replacing already budgeted activities that won’t be as effective.

If this approach is taken, the incremental funding required will drop considerably –although the effective value of the marketing impacted by the sponsorship may be many times the sponsorship fee – and your results will skyrocket, as you wring every last drop of value out of the investment.

The exception that makes the rule is big, quadrennial events (Olympics, World Cup), as the platform for deepening relevance and relationships often outstrips the amount of existing activities. In other words, even if those sponsors integrated it across everything they do – which they should – they still wouldn’t have exhausted the potential. In that case, war-chesting some money and spending up is entirely appropriate.

Sponsors who spend as much or more on leverage, incrementally, are doing so needlessly. If you take on board a best practice approach and moved sponsorship out of the sponsorship “box” and into the realm of “marketing catalyst”, you will get much better returns at a much lower cost.

For more on this, you may be interested in my white paper, “Last Generation Sponsorship”.  It’s been downloaded nearly 400,00 times.

If you’re interested in hands-on instruction on how to create big results from a much lower leverage budget (and a lot more!), I’ve got workshops coming up in Melbourne, Stockholm, and Los Angeles. The links for more information are below.

Melbourne

• Sponsorship Seekers – 20-21 April, Sponsors – 22 April
• Click here for more information and to register for Power Sponsorship Workshops in Melbourne
• Click here to download the Australasian Power Sponsorship Workshops Tour Brochure (PDF)

Stockholm

• Sponsorship Seekers – 18 May (half-day), Sponsors – 18 May (half-day). I’m also doing a keynote on best practice sponsorship and experiential marketing and a breakout session on ambush marketing on 19 May.
• Click here for more information on Scandinavian Sponsorship & Experiential Days

Los Angeles

• Sponsorship Seekers – 25 May, Sponsors – 26 May
• Click here for more information and to register for Power Sponsorship Workshops in Los Angeles
• Click here to download the Los Angeles Workshops Brochure (PDF)

It has been a four-day weekend down here in Oz – people don’t call this “The Lucky Country” for nothing! – and I have been studiously avoiding work.

Okay, not exactly true. I did manage to spend an entire day painting a new composter purple, moving plants around the garden to make room for it, and then transferring all of the horrifying contents of the old composter across to the new one. It took three showers before I didn’t stink like worm poo. I know… I digress.

So, I was doing a cursory check of my RSS feeds and found a lovely blog by my friends over at SponsorPark. They have provided a list of their favourite sponsorship resources. Yes, Power Sponsorship is on the list – thanks, SponsorPark! – but there are some others who are really fantastic, like Dan Beeman’s Sponsorship Insights Group and Brian Gaynor’s Partnership Activation blog.  I’m also a big fan of Jason Peck’s blog.

Here is a link to the whole list:

Recommended Sponsorship Resources from SponsorPark

And here’s a link to my recommended resources from a few months ago:

My Favourite Resources for Sponsorship Professionals

If you can’t find something useful with all those resources, you’re really not trying.