By very, very popular demand, I’ve created a ten-minute tutorial about how to create a sponsorship proposal that will make your offer stand out, increase your value to potential sponsors, and dramatically shorten your odds for a “yes”.

This is actually tutorial #3 for the Power Sponsorship YouTube Channel. Check it out for:

• Sponsorship Proposal Basics in About 10 Minutes
• Ambush Marketing Basics in About 10 Minutes
• Sponsorship Measurement Basics in About 10 Minutes

(Noticing a theme, here?)

I hope you enjoy them all. To kick you off, here is Sponsorship Proposal Basics in About 10 Minutes.

In recent days, I’ve been involved in a number of discussions where broker commissions have come up. The most common two questions I get are:

1. What should the commission percentage be?
2. Can I pay commission only?

These questions are fair enough, and probably smart to ask before you start talking to brokers. So, here goes…

Commission level

Commissions for brokers vary a lot, and can range anything from 10-35%. On rare occasions, I’ve even heard of commissions going as high as 50% to kick-start the sales process.

I have been asked if that commission level varies if the sponsorship seeker is a non-profit. The answer to that is “no”, the organisation category does not have any bearing on the commission level. There are a few things, however, that will contribute to the commission level:

• Amount of sponsorship to raise. Smaller sponsorships often have higher commission levels, as it is just as hard to sell them as larger sponsorships. In some cases (not always), once a sponsorship gets above a certain threshold, the commission also goes up, almost like a reward for getting the big bucks.
• Commercial appeal. Some properties are simply easier to sell than others, and while it is unlikely a broker will drop their commission if something was a no brainer, they will definitely bump up the commission if something looks like a long shot.
• Lead time. The closer you are to the event (if there is an event), the harder it is to sell sponsorship, as you are not giving the sponsor enough time to leverage the investment. It lowers the commercial appeal. At some point, your sales window with firmly slam, but there is a zone where it is difficult, but possible to sell sponsorship. In that window, a broker will probably charge you more.
• Multi-year deals. Some brokers will sell multi-year sponsorships and charge a commission for every year of the deal, usually on some kind of sliding scale – like 20%, 15%, 10% across three years. The scale varies a lot from broker to broker, and not all brokers charge every year. Some charge more for the first year and then don’t charge for subsequent years.
• Experience level of the broker. A highly experienced broker with a strong track record of sponsorship sales, particularly in your category, will warrant a higher commission level than someone who is brand new to sponsorship sales.

Additional costs

While you can probably find a broker that will work on commission only, most of the better brokers are requiring a small, up-front fee. This covers the costs of creating proposals, hit lists, etc – which can take some time to get right.

If your materials are in good shape, or if your event is particularly commercially attractive, you may be able to get the broker to waive this fee.

Where to find a broker

There are a lot of industry directories where you may find brokers (aka “sponsorship agencies”). Just get onto Google and go for your life.

If you’d prefer to start with a more concise list, you may want to check out the Power Sponsorship Broker Registry. I created it because I get asked to broker all the time and I don’t offer that service, so I wanted somewhere to point people!

You may also be interested in my white paper, “Cheat Sheet: Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Broker“. The questions will help you vet out potential brokers to find the one that is right for your needs.

Good luck!

One very big, but very general question has been popping up a lot on some of the discussion boards I monitor. The general gist is:

“How do I get sponsorship for my event?”

I could write a book answering that question! Oh yeah, I already have!

As you can imagine, the discussion boards are full of advice, but for the most part, that advice misses the most important thing a sponsorship seeker can do to maximise their sponsorship success and revenue.

I strongly believe that every sponsorship proposal should…

• Be focused on the sponsor’s needs, not your needs
• Be totally customised to those needs
• Provide multiple, creative ideas for sponsor leverage
• Have a creative benefits list that is built around the benefits needed for those leverage ideas

There is no question it is the sponsor’s job to plan and leverage their own sponsorships. That said, it is totally in your best interest to provide those ideas in the sales process. That way, they are not looking at your uncustomised, blank canvas-style proposal thinking, “what could I do with this?”, because, frankly, they will spend about 30 seconds thinking about those options before putting your proposal in the reject pile.

On the other hand, if you provide those ideas – an illustration of exactly how they can transform the opportunity you provide to the specific results they need – you will achieve four things:

• Your proposal will be in the very small percentage that will capture their attention and be considered. (Most are not customised and not about them in any way.)
• Your proposal will be worth more – that’s right, you can charge more – because it is results oriented.
• You are much more likely to get a “yes” because you’ve made it easy to say “yes”. In fact, many sponsors will say “yes” and then flick your proposal to a junior staffer and tell them to “make this leverage plan happen”.
• Even if they don’t say “yes” this time, you have established yourself as a credible, viable partner who really does get it. They will be happy to hear from you again.

The upshot is that you will probably send a lot fewer proposals, but they will be much more specific and much more successful.

This is a strategy that can also help you to extend your effective selling window in a short lead-time situation. Your event may be amazing, but sponsors do need time to plan and implement the leverage programs that will provide them with a marketing result. You can use these same techniques to come up with fast, low-load, creative leverage ideas – things that a sponsor can put into place quickly. This will ameliorate at least some of the lead-time factor.

If you’re considering hiring a broker or a service to write a proposal for you, be very careful. Ensure that they will be putting a lot of effort into creativity and customisation. Sending 50 or 100 or 200 uncustomised, search-and-replace proposals is not going to bring in the money or the types of sponsors you want.

A couple of resources that may be helpful:

For a full rundown on offer development and proposals – including a template – you may find The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3rd Edition very useful:

For some guidelines on hiring brokers (and proposal services), you may be interested in my white paper, “Cheat Sheet: Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Sponsorship Broker”.

After hundreds of thousands of downloads, I thought it was high time to give my white papers a format that is as professional and well thought-out as I hope the content is. While I was at it, I also did some updates and revisions.

Want to have a look? The download links are below. All are in PDF form and most are around 250kb. “Last Generation Sponsorship” is around 1mb, as it has a lot of diagrams.

You are welcome to share these documents around, but please do not link directly to the PDF download (called “deep linking”) without my permission. You are more than welcome to link to this blog or our Sponsorship Articles and Tools page.

Sponsorship white papers

• “Last Generation Sponsorship” – My blockbuster white paper on best practice sponsorship, downloaded almost 400,000 times, reprinted in many, many industry publications in eight languages. Download it for yourself. Download it for your partners. Download it for your boss, board, or colleague. This article is guaranteed to get anyone thinking more strategically about sponsorship!
• “Sponsorship in a Scary Economy” – A very topical paper with practical skills for both sponsors and sponsorship seekers.
• “Survival Guide for the New Sponsorship” – Practical things you can do to shift your organisation’s approach into best-practice.
• “Don’t Go to Another Sponsorship Conference Until You Read This” – All sponsorship conferences are NOT created equal. This great guide will help you sort the good from the bad (and make organisers of the bad ones really miserable, if you want to).
• “Sponsorship and the Public Sector” – A wake-up call for all government sponsorship seekers.
• “Top Ten Tips for Sponsorship Seekers” – Short and sharp, this is a must read for sponsorship seekers, particularly if you’re new to the game.
• “What Every CMO Needs to Know About Sponsorship” – Aimed at corporate chief marketing officers, this white paper offers advice about the high-level decisions and directives that will impact on sponsorship results.

Sponsorship cheat sheets

• “Cheat Sheet: Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Sponsorship Broker” - This is a compilation of questions that will allow great brokers to shine, expose the shonks, and clarify the weaknesses and strengths of all the brokers in between.
• “Cheat Sheet: Marketing Terms a Sponsorship Seeker Must Know” – This is a list of some of the most common, but confusing, terms that sponsors use when describing their objectives and target markets. If you want to ensure you know what sponsors are talking about, be sure you know all of them!

Please, tell me what you think!

Have you read any of these white papers or cheat sheets? Got a comment? Please, add your comments below. I’d love to see them!

Please note, comments are moderated, but we get through them quite quickly. Spammers just get sneakier and sneakier!

A while back, a colleague of mine needed a broker for a great series of events. I has huge potential for the right sponsor, and should have been a plum opportunity for a strong broker. I was able to put him in touch with some brokers, and he chose one, who promptly sold exactly nothing. It was disappointing, but as with all sponsorship sales, factors ranging from economic condition to plain bad luck could have been at play.

The event and broker went their separate ways and my colleague resigned himself to DIY. He got a couple of hot prospects on the line and asked for my help fine-tuning the proposal, which he had based on some of the broker’s proposals. That’s when it all became clear. It was awful. I’m not sure if that broker’s skills really were that bad, or if this was just an epic example of phoning it in. Either way, even if all the other stars had aligned, no sponsor was ever going to buy that first generation pile of hooey.

We worked together and redid the proposal, and while there are never any guarantees, at least he now has a fighting chance.

What this whole exercise illustrated, in technicolour detail, was that all brokers are not created equal, having a big name doesn’t mean you’re any good, and that the people who need brokers the most are probably least equipped to tell the good from the bad.

What you want is someone who will represent your event to its absolute best, to shorten the odds for a sale, to get you bigger and better sponsors than you have the time or skill to get on your own. What you don’t want is someone who has a great contacts list, but skills that are 20 years out of date; someone who doesn’t know the difference between a strategic game and a numbers game.

What I’ve done is to create a “Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Broker” cheat sheet. I recommend that anyone who is considering hiring a broker ask these questions, as the answers will tell you plenty about how it will be to work with them.

I am assuming that your preference is for a broker to take a best practice approach (not sure what that is? Read “Last Generation Sponsorship“.) Sponsorship offers built on best-practice principles create obvious and appealing strategic platforms for the potential sponsors. Also, any proposal built around the basics of best practice sponsorship will immediately get more attention from a potential sponsor.

Download “Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Broker”

The upshot is that there are amazing brokers, awful brokers, and plenty in between. If you’re going to hire one, you need to be selective, and that means asking the right questions and reading between the lines. I hope the cheat sheet helps and I wish you great success in raising sponsorship!