Sponsorships are a great way to partner with industry leaders and businesses. The benefits are far more than financial, they also include expanding your reach and demonstrating social proof of your organization’s impact and value. The sponsor benefits as well not only through the exposure to your constituents, but also by connecting with organization’s that share their values, showing goodwill in the community, and providing opportunities for their employees to participate in meaningful activities. In order for the sponsor to see results from their involvement, your organization must deliver on all the benefits you offered.
Before using AssociationSphere, you probably kept a spreadsheet with the names of your sponsors and a list of items you needed to provide or do for that sponsor. You had to manually update it with new sponsors and keep track of when items were complete. With AssociationSphere, you can assign sponsorships and track deliverables right within the software. In the Transactions & Invoicing Module using Sponsorships, you can create different sponsorship levels, assign tasks to those levels, and automatically assign follow up activities for specific users. In the Events and Membership pages, you can link sponsorships to specific levels and as soon as a transaction is recorded for that level, the follow up tasks are automatically assigned. Sponsorships can also be linked to general transactions and pledges. When entering or updating a transaction, there is a link to sponsorships and just like memberships and events, once that transaction is saved, the sponsorship task assignments are automatically created.
For a golf tournament sponsorship deliverables might include things like a foursome, banner at the event, social media posts, two tee hole signs, the company’s logo on the event t-shirt, a video message played at the event, a full page ad in the program, and a feature article in the nonprofit’s newsletter. These activities might be performed by several different staff members, so you are able to link the specific staff member to the task using the Follow-ups feature as shown in Figure 1. These activities might be performed by several different staff members, so you are able to link the specific staff member to the task using the Follow-ups feature as shown in Figure 2 below.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Each staff member will be able to track their own tasks via My Follow Ups and you can see all the tasks (or deliverables) for all the sponsorships in the Transactions & Invoicing Module on the Sponsorships page in the Manage Follow Ups grid. Like all grids you can create, save, and share views using the filters and sorts on the columns. You can edit each activity to show when it was completed, by whom, and any comments associated with completing the task. As shown on Figure 3 below, with the Actions menu you can even export to Excel if you really miss having that spreadsheet!
Figure 3
The software also offers other features to stay in touch with your sponsors like automatic emails for event and membership purchases, text and email messaging prior to and during events, and auto post-event thank you emails. You want your sponsors to know that you delivered all the benefits promised, the impact of their sponsorship on your organization and any fundraising efforts, as well as the reach of their sponsorship with attendee numbers and other statistics. The sponsors can use this information to demonstrate the advantages of your long-term partnership.
If you want your sponsors to come back year after year, you have to be organized and able to demonstrate the value. Having all the information within the CRM allows everyone on your team to have access to up to date information, contact information for any of the sponsors is just a click away, and individual staff members can see their assignments in one place which makes it easier to keep track of tasks and manage your work and show those sponsors they really are getting a lot of bang for their buck.