Mar 14, 2011 at 01:49 PM
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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 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 annual events. SponsorPitch would like to change this, and we want to do it not once a year, but every single day.


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:

  • Get credit for and promote the deals you have done
  • Demonstrate your knowledge of and experience with brands and properties
  • Build a contextually relevant network based on your accomplishments and experiences
  • Promote your achievements to peers, partners and future employers


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    Sponsor Index

    The Sponsor Index is ground zero for sponsorship seekers and for marketers that want real-time insights on their competitors and category. Brand pages can be created by and edited by any professional member of SponsorPitch. They are like wiki pages for sponsors, with easy to edit tools. They contain information such as:

  • Decision maker contacts (name, title, email, phone number)
  • Sponsorship deals a brand is reported to have done
  • Other SponsorPitch members that have worked with/are familiar with the brand


    Property Index

    A catalogue of sponsorship properties that allows you to:

  • Search for a property and find brands reported to have sponsored it
  • Indicate yourself as someone selling a property
  • Search brands to find out which properties they have sponsored


    The more sponsorship deals a property has (reported to SponsorPitch), the higher it will climb on the Property Index.

    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. We're less than a full week into our relaunch so this is just the beginning.

    How You Can Join The Movement and Spread the Word

  • First and foremost, create your Profile.
  • Upgrade your membership and lock in your unique price.
  • Start adding your insights, information & experiences to brand pages in the Sponsor Index to earn SPoints, which will help you gain membership badges and discounts.
  • Invite your co-workers and colleagues to join SponsorPitch. Share a SponsorPitch invite with them using our share app and you'll get your first 5 "SPoints." Properties, brands, agencies are all welcome.
  • Promote the hell out of SponsorPitch on all your social media networks.
  • If you are a reporter, blogger, or have a newsletter, ask to interview SponsorPitch and bring our start-up story to your audience. We won't bore you, it's actually is pretty interesting! Contact: [email protected]
  • If you manage a sales staff, have all your account execs fill out and maintain an up-to-date SponsorPitch professional profile, and allow them to expense the cost of a subscription upgrade.
  • If you teach a class, encourage your students to fill out professional profiles, look at the profiles of other professionals, and contact someone. Make it a class assignment to have an informational interview with someone found on SponsorPitch.
  • If you work with an organization (agency, association, service provider) that serves people involved with the sponsorship market on the sell or buy side, and want to join/partner with SponsorPitch’s efforts to build out a sponsorship intelligence and information sharing infrastructure, please contact: Michael Munson
  • If you work for a brand that receives unsolicited sponsorship requests, refer people making them to SponsorPitch to turn them on to a great resource that will help them and continue building this valuable resource to lift the industry.


    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!