I have been involved with an event that has attracted significant business sponsorship and had support from Microsoft Australia, Google Australia, Adelaide City Council, ANZ Bank, Piper Alderman Lawyers and BDO.
An “A” tier sponsor is any sponsor you think could provide more sponsorship than any other.
The best method for recruiting “A” tier sponsor is what I called “Leveraging Up.”
Leveraging Up is where you start recruiting lower tier sponsor (that is any sponsor you think could provide sponsorship) to build a foundation and sponsor “portfolio”.
Once you have this foundation and sponsor “portfolio” in place, then you can begin to recruit “A” tier sponsor.
How you get sponsorship is very similar to The Partner Recruitment Process:
- Sponsor Identification;
- Suspect For Sponsors;
- Find Contact Information;
- Sponsor Preparation;
- Initiating Outreach;
- Sponsor Recruitment; and
- Sponsor On-boarding.
Beyond that same process, it’s worth bearing in mind the following rules:
- Different sponsors want different things. Google came on board because Microsoft They wanted brand association more than anything. Whereas smaller sponsors wanted business development opportunistic.
- No one wants to be your first (social proof is key). Sponsors want to see that other partners have de-risked you and your offer before they do;
- Start with lower-tier sponsors and ask for in-kind not cash to solve issue #1. This means you should not try and recruit “A” tier partners in the first instance. So to begin with, start recruiting “Z” tier partners. These could be friends or people who know, like and trust you already. You don’t need to use these as partners in the long term, but they do provide social proof that you can leverage up to higher partners; and
- Once you have some sponsors who have put their hand up and made you “credible” for other sponsors, use the principle of “Levering Up” and show higher tier sponsors you have lower tier sponsors on board – they don’t need to know it was in-kind only as each sponsorship deal is different. Once “Z” tier partners are recruited, then move on to recruit “Y” tier partners, then again when they are recruited, use that social proof to recruit “X” tier partners (and so on) all the way up to recruiting “A” tier partners. By the time you get to “A” tier partners, they are more likely to say yes to your partnership offer as many other partners have said yes to your partnership offer first. The fact that they are lower tier partner, in most instances, does not matter to the higher tier partners. This is why this method is given the name of “Leveraging Up.”
In addition, incentive-based fundraising, such as crowdfunding (that provides a reward in exchange for sponsorship) is probably at the cutting edge for what is best practice for motivating people to donate money, but you need to have scalable (digital) incentives (bonuses) build you contact database first.