Measuring Your Program's Success - corporate sponsorship

David Grant is senior vice president/management supervisor at Clarion Performance Properties, a sports and entertainment marketing agency based in Greenwich, Conn.

Let's face it. Sponsorship decisions today are made under more scrutiny and financial risk than ever before. Companies can no longer afford to rely on a good demographic match or "gut" to make sponsorship decisions. The state of the sponsorship industry today--exhibiting continual pressure to show tangible return on investment of the heavy dollars involved--makes it imperative that marketers make sponsorship decisions grounded in strategic principles that are measured against established objectives.

While the need for systematic sponsorship decision making is acknowledged as essential by most companies, surprisingly, many lack either their own set of strategic principles to do so or have guidelines that are sorely in need of updating.

How do marketers go about assessing their sponsorship health? A sponsorship blueprint can be one of the most useful tools for marketers to establish a strategic foundation from which all of their present and future sponsorship decisions will be based. The blueprint is intended to help companies answer some critical questions relating to their sponsorship activities: How can I better leverage the sponsorships that I have? Do I have the right properties in my sponsorship portfolio? What is the role of sponsorship/event marketing in my marketing mix? How should I measure my sponsorship investments/programs? What are the core strategies which should drive my sponsorship effort? How do I evaluate the plethora of proposals that come across my desk? How do I find the right properties for my brand? Sponsor an existing property or create one? How do I get my internal organization supporting the sponsorship effort? What are my competitors doing?

Analysis of research, "best practices" from other industries, property fees, corporate budget comparisons and identification and capitalization on trends produces a sponsorship blueprint that provides answers to these essential questions. To be truly impactful, the process needs to be customized to a particular company's position in the marketplace, its experience with sponsorships, internal dynamics and other individual circumstances.

Once your blueprint has been constructed, what do you do with what you've learned? Your blueprint looks to the future by providing you with a tangible framework with which to evaluate future proposals--independent of the vagaries of individual egos and personnel changes that invariably occur within any organization. The sponsorship blueprint provides a set of clearly definable criteria to judge incoming proposals and an understanding of which company activities should be continued (and perhaps expanded) and those which no longer suit company needs. It is also effective as a means of responding to the host of inappropriate proposals companies often receive from important constituents.

The blueprint will also ensure that your sponsorships are fully leveraged, providing you with maximum return on your investment.

While it will help you separate the obvious "yes" from "no" sponsorship decisions, a blueprint will also help you convert proposals that may be suitable in many respects, but weak in other areas. Together, sponsor and property can transform the program into one that clearly suits all of your needs. The blueprint is also a good internal tool to help a corporate unit demonstrate its philosophy, organization and goals to partner business units.

This communication is critical when those business units are helping to fund or leverage a sponsorship.

IBM's sponsorship blueprint, for example, provided tangible support of its on-going sponsorships in tennis, golf and the Olympics. Sponsorships became leveraged across all business units--domestic and international--further maximizing the company's return on its sponsorship investments. Chase's recently completed sponsorship blueprint provided a foundation to help the banking giant separate itself from the clutter of its competition.

Bottom line: Is the spend on a sponsorship blueprint worthwhile for your company? Probably. In addition to IBM and Chase, long-time sponsorship veterans such as Pontiac, Texaco, Sprint and Wendy's have benefited from blueprints.

A sponsorship blueprint is an investment that ensures a strategic path, a consistent evaluation of proposals, maximum leveraging and synergy of sponsorship efforts between individual business units for years to come.

COPYRIGHT 1998 BPI Communications, Inc.
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