Events 101 — Finding the right sponsor

Sponsors are not absolutely necessary for your events, but they can make a difference. They can enable you to provide a better event experience for your attendees. How do you go about engaging them and making sure the sponsorship works for everyone though?

Appropriate Value Exchange

If you are running events and are looking to bring on sponsors, then I believe that the most important place to start is with value. This is not about money though, it’s about what value the different people involved can provide to each other. You may think that your relationship with any potential sponsor is the focus here, but you need to also consider your attendees’ relationship with the sponsor too.

An example of why this is important: You take on a sponsor that provides you with the support and resources to improve your event significantly (location, food, drinks etc), but their requested value in return is in doing an hour long pitch/product demo and signing up all the attendees to their mailing list. The demo turns out to not be of interest to the audience and is way too long, which means that although the audience got a better event, their payoff for that was to have an hour of their time “wasted”. This means the event loses reputation AND your sponsor isn’t happy because it was the wrong audience and they didn’t get the response they wanted.

Make sure you understand what everyone is looking to get from any sponsorship arrangement and that it fits with the event and the attendees’ expectations.

Where to start

The easiest part of the value equation to establish is yours: what is the minimum support and sponsorship the event needs to be successful? Once you have an idea of this, you can then begin to think about what is acceptable sponsor involvement for your attendees.

Ways in which a sponsor can get involved:

• Event branding (banners, tees, flyers, photos/videos).
• Promotion through event emails/website/sign up page etc.
• Speaking at the event.
• Event giveaways (goodies or free services/products).

The next step

Once you have an idea of what you will allow a sponsor to do and what you will not allow them to do, you can formulate a rough package in your head (or as a document if required). When you have this, you then need to think why the sponsor might want to be involved:

• Does the sponsor have products or services related to your event (i.e. hosting providers for a hackathon)?
• Are they looking to increase general awareness of their brand?
• Do they want to sell to your audience?
• Can they valuably contribute content, expertise and information to the event (and therefore improve their reputation)?

This will allow you to filter potential sponsors fairly quickly, if you can’t see any value in it for them, then you should probably look elsewhere.

There’s not a great deal of help I can provide in contacting specific sponsors, that’s simply a case of hard work; identify potential companies, ask for introductions and maybe make some cold approaches too.

In conversations with sponsors though, I have found that you get a long way in just being honest and transparent. “We need £X, to do Y and Z at the event and the breakdown of those costs is below, for this you’ll get...” will get you a lot further than “The price is £X and you get…”.

The Best Sponsors

When a sponsor is contextual to an event, the attendees understand why they are there immediately and it just makes sense. The sponsor also knows that they’re in front of the right people. Finding context for your sponsors, or a fun way to tie them into the event will help their decision in supporting what you do.

A good sponsor also understands your attendees and what is and isn’t acceptable at the event. Good community understanding, or at least the wherewithal to know that they don’t know the community (maybe that’s why they’re there) is very valuable and can help avoid difficult conversations.

Areas of caution

If you’re running a large event, you’re probably going to need multiple sponsors, be very aware of conflicts of interest and remember to consider all parties (sponsors, speakers, attendees, event partners-venue etc). The best way to avoid this is planning, have tiered sponsorships with clearly defined packages. This way everyone knows what they are getting and where they will be seen (or not seen).

In the past we have largely avoided speakers also being sponsors (apart from brief sponsor talks), this avoids the implication of favouritism or bias. It also avoids any awkward situations whereby a speaker makes an unreasonable request and is also the sponsor for the event, which would make it a complicated discussion.

Make sure you can deliver the benefits to the sponsor that you say you can. Stretching the truth or getting carried away with your expectation for the event is likely to result in ill feeling when the event doesn’t deliver for your sponsor. This reflects badly on you as an organiser and also means it is less likely that the sponsor will remain a supporter.

Summary

• Think about what everyone gets from the sponsorship and if this is acceptable to them all.
• Make sponsors contextual to your event wherever possible.
• Avoid conflicts with clear communication and planning.
• Do not over-promise on what you can provide sponsors.

If you missed them, I’ve written about other aspects of event organising here:

• Events 101 — Where to start & the “Why”?
• Events 101 — Who do you need to run a successful event?
• Events 101 — The “How” of event running

And if you’d like more information on the London Startup Scene, you could do worse than to take a look here.