With tight economic conditions, sponsorship is one of the many business tools you need to manage carefully. Recently I witnessed an excellent example of an organisation leveraging their sponsorship investment wisely.

However, a quick disclaimer – they were leveraging their sponsorship of our very own Sunshine Coast Business Confidence Survey!

Yes, I’m talking about the Sunshine Coast Institute of TAFE and we are proud to work with them in a partnership approach towards furthering the local economy.

The reason I think they did such a fabulous job is because in my experience I have seen so many sponsorship activities under utilised, often to the point of being classified as wasteful or indulgent.

Many organisations think that whacking their logo up there at an event or on a document will make a difference, when clearly it doesn’t.

TAFE looked for opportunities to align their business engagement activities with the goals and objectives of the business confidence survey and used the launch of the survey results as an opportunity to launch their Employer Academy.  

This approach not only resulted in a strong positive reception from the participants at the event (their target audience for the Employer Academy), it also created significant positive media coverage for the organisation.

Both Channel 7 news and WIN news covered the event, and both followed their report on the survey results with a positive upbeat ‘someone is doing something towards helping the business community’ type comment regarding the TAFE’s employer academy initiative.  See below for the WIN news coverage.

So when considering your next sponsorship activity, before you start, make sure that your proposed sponsorship activity addresses a strategic need within your business.

You should ask yourself some burning questions prior to committing to any form of sponsorship:

• Will this give me access to my targeted audience?
• 
Does this fit with my overall strategy?

• What will this activity ‘say’ about my brand?
• And most importantly, what am I going to do in addition to handing over the sponsorship money to make this sponsorship really WORK for me?

You want to make sure that you are fully utilising the sponsorship opportunity to stand out from the crowd.  You should never take a ‘me-too’ approach. 

Don’t expect your name and/or logo up on the screen to create any significant difference with your target audience if that is all you provide, therefore you should really leverage your sponsorship by creating unique supporting activities to make your sponsorship stand out.

Sponsorship also needs to link to other areas of your business. For example, does your HR Manager know about your sponsorship and can they link to the activity for recruitment or staff morale purposes?

Every dollar you spend on sponsorship needs to be carefully planned and executed as you would any other business decision.