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!

I got a strange e-mail the other day. It was sort of a blind request for a super-comprehensive proposal to sell sponsorship for a large event that is only three weeks away. The return e-mail was a Gmail address. It was a real “what the…?” moment.

I don’t know what possessed me, but I called the guy. As it turns out, he wasn’t the sponsor, but the broker – or had been. He’d sold a ton of sponsorship and the sponsee didn’t pay him the commission owed. My guess is that he was trying to get ammunition for a lawsuit. In any case, it looked desperate.

I know it is easy to be dazzled by some of the figures involved – “25% of a million dollars is… oh man, I could really use $250k!!” – but before you put your time, reputation, contacts, and business on the line on behalf of another organisation, you need to ensure you are protected.

So, how does a broker ensure s/he gets paid? How do they avoid a situation so desperate that they resort to embarrassing, Hail Mary e-mails to bolster their case? If you want legal advice, you won’t get it from me. I’m definitely not legally qualified. But, I’ve also been around the block and do have a few insights on how to ensure you get paid by your clients, the sponsees:

• Get references – If you’re not very familiar with the potential client, ask them if they’ve had a broker before, and if so, who. Ask if they mind if you speak to the ex(es). If they have an issue with this, consider it a red flag.
• Get the history – Be sure you understand how long the event or organisation has been around, who is involved, the business structure, prior events that may not be around anymore, and other key details. Non-payment seems to be a lot more common with newer, cash-challenged events than with more established organisations, but that’s not always the case. Don’t go in blind.
• Get paid first – You can always insist that the sponsorship fees go through your company, whereby, you can take out your contracted percentage before passing the remainder along to the sponsee. If they balk at this, you should be able to arrange for deposit to an escrow account (talk to your lawyer) and division, per the contract, from there. If they balk at escrow, consider that another red flag.
• Have a contract – You need to ensure your broker relationship is completely spelled out in a contract, including how and when you will be paid. If brokering is going to be part of your ongoing job description, it is worth having a lawyer do a template for you, as a starting point. Do not do any work until you have a contract in place.

Thankfully, most sponsees aren’t out to do the wrong thing and most will very happily pay whatever is owed to someone who brings them revenue. But selling sponsorship is hard enough work to be worrying about whether you’re going to get paid to do it. Get the lowdown. Protect yourselves. Don’t send weird e-mails to total strangers.