Now, for each sponsor you can remember, ask yourself these questions:

1. Apart from the fact that they sponsor this sport, what else do you know about them? Has the fact that they sponsored your favourite sport affected your view of them? Made you think of them more often? Kept their name and brand in your mind? Have you become “a raving fan” of their product(s)?
2. If you’ve purchased a product or service in their product category in the last twelve months, did you choose their brand? If so, was it (at least in part) because of their sponsorship? If not, why not?
3. Do they use the sponsorship as a means of interacting with you and/or keeping in touch?

In those three areas of questioning, we’ve pretty much encapsulated the core benefits that sponsors should be seeking from sponsorships:

• Brand & Product Awareness
• Direct Sales (or sales influence); or
• Customer Relationship building.

What Do Sponsors Want?
Research in early 2008 (the Eighth Annual IEG/Performance Research Sponsorship Decision-Makers Survey), drawing from 165 sponsorship decision-makers around the world provides some interesting insights into sponsorship.

The full report is available here if you’re interested, but these are the key findings:

Which category do you expect your company to be more involved with this year (2008)?

• 41% of the respondents cited Sports
• 27% Causes
• 27% Community Events
• 23% Online sponsorship
• 16% Entertainment
• 12% The Arts

And less?

• 26% Entertainment
• 20% Online sponsorship
• 21% The Arts
• 15% Community Events
• 12% Sports
• 10% Causes

How do you typically go about selecting a property to sponsor?

• 75% set strategy and then sought the right property
• 73% were approached directly by property owners.
• 28% received details about a sponsorship property from a sales agency
• 13% consult a sponsorship specialist to determine strategy

What percentage of your marketing budget is spent on sponsorship?

• 43% – 1-10% of the budget
• 26% – 11-20%
• 15% - 21-30%
• 7% – 31-40%
• 7% – 41-50%
• 3% – 51-75% of the budget

On top of the rights fees paid for your sponsorship, what is the ratio as to how much more your company typically spends on leveraging and activation?

• 17% – less than 1 to 1
• 48% – 1 to 1
• 14% – 2 to 1
• 12% – 3 to 1
• 9% – 4 to 1 or more

During the past 12 months, which of the following marketing communication channels have you used to leverage your sponsorship programs?

• 80% Traditional Advertising
• 77% Public Relations
• 71% Internal Communications
• 69% Hospitality
• 63% Internal Tie-Ins
• 62% Direct Marketing
• 60% Sampling On-Site
• 50% Business to Business
• 47% Sales Promotion Offers

In past years, less than 5% of effort was spent on Contests, Discounts, Displays, EMarketing, Experiential Activation or Promotional Giveaways

What do you consider the most valuable benefits to your organisation?

• 64% Category Exclusivity
• 54% On-Site Signage
• 45% Broadcast Ad opportunity
• 43% ID in property collateral materials
• 41% Title of Proprietary Area
• 39% Sponsor ID in Property’s Media Buy
• 38% presence on property website
• 36% Access to Property’s Database
• 31% right to use propertyy marks/logos
• 23% Access to Property-provided research

Which of the following do you typically analyze when making your sponsorship decision?

• 92% Demographics
• 82% Attendance
• 73% Fan passion/affinity
• 50% What your competition sponsors
• 49% Psychographics
• 49% Growth trends in property category
• 42% Interest in the property amongst trade/dealers
• 36% TV Ratings

The above data gives some useful insights if you’re planning to get involved in sponsorship. But (especially if you’re being constantly approached for sponsorship dollars) we reckon you need more. So we’ve come up with a tool to help you reach some useful and meaningful conclusions about prospective sponsorship proposals. We’ve even given it a snappy name:

Sponsorship Evaluation Checklist

We’ve put together a comprehensive 60-Step Checklist that leads you through the process of evaluating potential sponsors, whether for sports, arts, cause-related, online or community-interest properties.

Here’s a sampling of the issues you need to consider as part of any sponsorship assessment:

• Alignment of brand values: looking at the big picture, would being associated with this sponsorship send the right messages and make consumers more rabidly enthusiastic about your brand?
• Audience reach: even if the sponsorship property is a really good fit with your brand, does it reach enough people for the money?
• Sponsorship levels: will you be the top dog in this sponsorship, or at a lower (associate sponsor) level — and how does that impact on your ability to get noticed and leverage the sponsorship?
• Consumer profiling: what can the organisers tell you about the people who support this property (and how do they know)?
• Trends: is this property attracting more interest than ever, in a dwindling interest category or somewhere inbetween? What are the implications in associating your brand with such a property?
• Competitors: what are those pesky competitors of yours doing? Will sponsoring this property enable you to outdazzle their efforts or are you just playing me-too?
• Trade interest: what do your dealers think of this property? If you give them free tickets to the event, will they eagerly snap them up (and plead for more) or will they languish in a drawer?
• Sponsorship elements to consider: what’s on offer and which elements fit your marketing plan?
• Affordability: how much of your budget will this sponsorship consume, how much more to leverage it effectively and how does that compare to alternative promotional opportunities?
• Leveraging opportunities: sponsorship is only a small part of the process – what counts is how you leverage it. What does this sponsorship property offer?
• Visibility: is the event high-profile enough to be noticed by your prospective clients?
• Hospitality: what’s on offer by way of opportunities for you to bring along clients, prospects and/or the trade?
• Media coverage: will you be on the telly? If so, how you ensure that TV audiences will see your logo?
• Rights on offer: not to be picky or anything, but you need to make sure that the rights being offered to you can be delivered in reality (i.e. they’re available and haven’t been grabbed by others)
• Credentials: in similar vein, check out the credentials of the oganisation offering you the property. Are they official representatives or just trying to piggyback? Do they have the authority and ability to make the deal?
• Ambush marketing considerations: could your competitors sneak in and undercut your sponsorship with dirty ambush marketing tricks? We identify some of the possible angles you need to explore.
• Post-Event Evaluation: so how did it go? You need independent verification of the results, because the organisers will naturally be gungho.

There’s a whole lot more, but for that you’ll need the Checklist.

The Sponsorship Evaluation Checklist (provided as a download in PDF format) is yours for just $47 (+tax where applicable). If you’re considering any sort of sponsorship, you absolutely need this Checklist. Click on this link for credit card ordering via PayPal and instant fulfilment via eJunkie.

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According to Pat, these are the five key questions that have been known to pop up in discussion with CEOs/CFOs, often short-circuiting otherwise brilliant marketing careers.

1. What are the specific goals for our marketing spending, and how should we expect to connect that spending to incremental revenue and/or margins?
2. What would be the short and long-term impacts on revenue and margins if we spent 20% more/less on marketing overall in the next 12 months?
3. Compared to relevant benchmarks (historical, competitive, and marketplace), how effective are we at transforming marketing investments into profit growth?
4. What are appropriate targets for improving our marketing leverage ($’s of profit per $ of marketing spend) in the next 1/3/5 year horizons, and what key initiatives are we counting on to get us there?
5. What are the priority questions we need to answer to inform our knowledge of the payback on marketing investments – and what are we doing to close those knowledge gaps?

How you answer these five questions will get you promoted, fired, or worse — marginalized.

So what should you do?

Pat provides specific, actionable, accountable recommendations.

If you’re a marketer, this is a must-read.

Related posts:

1. Marketing In The Era of Accountability In 1980, the UK’s esteemed Institute of Practitioners in Advertising...