Jul 12, 2012 at 04:56 PM
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The Importance of Syndicating Sponsorship Value

Whether you’re working in a business environment focused on a B2C or a B2B market, you’re likely very busy working at moving the needle on your business’s dashboard around sales and brand health. Hopefully, your sponsorship investments are helping towards that end.


Consider the importance of syndicating the value of the collective sponsorship assets in your portfolio of sponsored properties across your organization and not just in the areas you’ve traditionally looked to.

This syndication of sponsorship value and benefits is key for at least two reasons.

Sweating the Assets

You can squeeze more measurable benefit out of your sponsorships the harder you make them work. You build more return on investment (ROI) data points, better enabling you to monetize your ROI and tell better stories internally around success (or failure) of your sponsorship activity.

2. Internal Support

The more business units, profit centers, functional areas across the organization that are deriving benefit from your sponsorship investments and that are participating in activating them, the stronger the support those sponsorships will receive and the easier it will be for the organization to rationalize the investment. On this note, don’t discount the benefit of the excitement and interest that employees, department heads, business unit leaders will have in sharing ownership of the sponsorships and their activation in influencing budget approvals and alignment from senior leadership.

A few examples for syndicating sponsorship value across your organization:

  • - Your HR department may be able to make use of elements of a sponsorship for employee reward and recognition. A particular sponsorship may provide an opportunity for employees to volunteer, participate or meet consumers or customers face to face. This ability to connect with your business’s target audience can be particularly powerful for employees who don’t come from customer/consumer facing areas of the business

  • - Through a sponsorship, the business/market intelligence team can gain access to motivated and engaged consumer/user audience for research; surveys, focus groups, ethnographic studies. On-site activation points can be a fertile space to trial new product and service innovations

  • - Your senior management can gain credible access to senior management from co-sponsors of the sponsored property and develop relationships that wind up being strategically significant. Mergers and acquisitions, co -marketing efforts and institutional best practice sharing have all come about as the result of relationships that started via sponsorships

    Important in effectively syndicating this value and benefit to other business units and functional areas of your business is to involve these stakeholders early.

    Don’t simply drop activation ideas on their desks and expect them to embrace them readily. Whether it’s on a broader scale or against a particular sponsorship, first have a conversation with your colleagues in other areas of the business and help them see what white space there may be for them within all or a specific sponsorship. Learn what their needs are and what problems you may be able to help them solve. Be ready educate them on the possibilities and the ways sponsorship can help them be successful.

    Ian Malcolm is President of Desperado Marketing, a sponsorship and experiential marketing agency established in 1996 with offices in Toronto and Chicago. He blogs at desperadomarketing.com/blog and allows us to republish here when the subject fits.

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