The New SponsorPitch: Here's Everything You Need To Know
This week hundreds of sponsorship professionals will gather in Chicago at IEG's annual sponsorship industry conference. The information attendees get from the esteemed panel of brand speakers will be insightful as always, and will be shared freely throughout Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels. The actionable insights shared and gained at cocktail hours, in between sessions, or even in airports or planes before and after the event, unfortunately, will not. Thousands of sponsorship pros, from across the globe, will miss out on these informal discussions and networking opportunities that often are as important, if not more, than the content offered at such events themselves. SponsorPitch would like to change this.
Over the last year SponsorPitch has talked to brand side marketers, sponsorship sales professionals, and both buy and sell side agency representatives. We heard the same concern many times over. There are fiercely protected fiefdoms of stale insight in every corner of the market, hoarding information that would have much more value if unleashed to the masses. The result, to our industry's detriment, is a relatively stagnant and constantly under attack sponsorship marketing industry, with sparse cohesiveness and certainly no common meeting place to facilitate the growth and expansion of the medium. If you work in sponsorship, your job is made more difficult and your career potential is stymied by the status quo. We can do better in the social media age.
We were so inspired by the frustration about how things are and the potential for a better reality, that we decided to completely change the SponsorPitch website and go in a totally new direction. We hope you and the whole sponsorship world will follow our lead. What, specifically, has us so fired up?
In simple terms, it is long past time for you to have an easily accessible infrastructure that provides access to the information you need to do your job at the speed of business in the 21st Century. An information exchange all market participants can use is needed to spur the evolution and esteem of sponsorship. The opportunity costs of not having this resource are too high to you as a sponsorship professional, no matter what role you play in the market. We had to do something about it.
More specifically, we no longer can stomach organizations charging outsized prices for basic information about the industry that create informed and uninformed classes of sponsorship practitioners. We want sales people to stop keeping their insights and experiences to themselves so the same work must be done by thousands of their peers to recreate the same “research wheel.” We are fed up with brands hiding what they do/don’t want from their sponsorship investments so sales professionals are left guessing what they should offer. And, we have talked to enough people to know there is real interest in a collaborative, peer-driven sponsorship intelligence network to overcome these industry shortcomings.
These are just a few reasons why SponsorPitch is leading the charge to more efficiently and affordably connect people and ideas in sponsorship, and put an end to the status quo tools and practices retarding the evolution of the medium we are all so passionate about. We're tired of seeing other marketing mediums take bigger bites of brand marketing budgets and we'll do everything we can to help sponsorship take back its share of the marketing spend. Our goal is to see SponsorPitch become the default social intelligence application that collects, connects, and shares information about what is and has been going on in the sponsorship marketplace with anyone that wants to know. This is the first step in that goal.
Among the things that the re-launched SponsorPitch offers:
Your Profile – Where it All Starts
You have a LinkedIn page, a Facebook page. But do they capture data specifically relevant to sponsorship professionals and link you directly to the brands and properties with which you have experience? SponsorPitch's Professional Profile lets you:
Sponsor Index
The Sponsor Index is ground zero for sponsorship seekers and marketers looking for insights on their category. Brand pages can be created by and edited by any professional member of SponsorPitch. They are like wiki pages for brands, with easy edit tools. They contain information such as:
Property Index
A catalogue of sponsorship properties that allows you to:
Setting Expectations
Like YouTube, LinkedIn, or Facebook, the value SponsorPitch offers will only be as great as our users make it. There are some free things on the site for students, but users must upgrade to a professional account for access to the most valuable stuff. This, of course, will help us maintain and improve the site with the exciting features we have planned. This is only the beginning, really. We hope you view a SponsorPitch subscription as an important investment in your career. Nevertheless, we recognize and appreciate the value of your contributions to the network, so we’ve developed a couple of other ways to reward you for participating:
1. You earn points for your contributions toward price discounts
2. When you join you pay slightly less than the next user, so the faster you become a professional subscriber, the more you save off the future price.
The more people that use SponsorPitch, the more value it will provide to the industry and our members. Moreover, you will be rewarded for both getting on board at the beginning, and also for making contributions to the greater universe of accessible market intelligence. Imagine the data available if everyone participates, and what a deal you get by being an early subscriber if they do! A bit on pricing here.
We want to improve the site and make it the best one you use. If it is not there yet, please help us get there. The best way to help is to use the site. Create a professional profile as complete as you can. Update it as your accomplishments grow. Add data on brand pages. Become a Professional subscriber. Reach out to and meet new people by shared interests and experiences. And of course, give us feedback about how to improve the offering. [email protected]
Everyone in the sponsorship marketplace – property sales professionals, brand side decision makers, buy or sell side agency reps – is invited to get on board with SponsorPitch to push their careers and the industry forward.
There are nearly 600 brands, over 650 sponsorship decision makers, over 700 deals and properties from all over the world already being tracked on SponsorPitch as we speak.
How You Can Join The Movement and Spread the Word
If you already have a SponsorPitch account, log in, and create your profile. If you do not have an account, go to sponsorpitch.com to create an account and get started. We'll be reaching out to our members with more information on our future later today and in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, thanks for helping us create a better reality for the sponsorship industry!