In their February report, IEG Inc. forecasted that for-profit corporations and businesses are expected to spend more than $1 billion this year on nonprofit sponsorships, in addition to the nearly $340 million on sponsorship arrangments with associations and membership organizations. While organizing sponsorships can take a little more effort than other fundraising efforts, the payoff can be far more great. But where do you start? Where else but Fundraising Well? If your organization has contemplated starting — or resuming — a sponsorship campaign, here are steps you need to take to ensure a successful sponsorship campaign. This topic is so good that we couldn't fit everything in one issue! Stay tuned for the conclusion in next month's Fundraising Well. Good luck, and as always, let us know what you think! You have received this email because you are subscribed to Fundraising Well, a monthly newsletter about fundraising effectively in today's world. Subscription information is located at the bottom of this newsletter.
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Be Creative and Boost Your Annual Fund Potential At one end of the sponsorship spectrum are donors who provide an organization's bedrock annual support. It makes sense to give these donors as much recognition and credit as possible. If their gifts are large, you can even specify that certain programs, efforts, or activities have been made possible because of their support. Once an organization has made a practice of linking gifts from certain donors to certain of its activities, the next step is to offer those donors sponsorships. Ideally, a single donor becomes the sole sponsor of an activity. The activity may be new, or already in existence. The sponsor gets the exclusive benefit of associating its name with the event or program. Often a sponsor's name can become synonymous with an event. For example, when I say Thanksgiving Day parade, I bet the name Macy's jumps to mind. In a survey some years back, 97 percent of the participants made that association. The beauty of funding something in this way is that you can ask for more money for a sponsorship than the donor was contributing to your annual fundraising campaign. You can also ratchet up the cost of the sponsorship every few years; one that was available for $10,000 three or four years ago now requires a $15,000 contribution. At the other end of the sponsorship spectrum are the companies and individuals who have shown no interest in your organization in the past. They may even have turned down earlier solicitations. A named sponsorship opportunity that provides high visibility can be just the ticket to drawing in a prospect who has previously been reluctant to give. The first step in seeking sponsorships is to identify likely projects, programs, events, initiatives, and activities. I can't think of an organization that would not have some underwriting or sponsorship opportunities. Remember, creating a sponsorship often requires nothing more than a rethinking of the means by which you fund something. Nearly any discrete endeavor can be pulled from a general budget and packaged, such as underwriting six months of a scoutmaster’s service to 20 inner-city children, three months of computer training for a welfare mother to help prepare her for employment, or sponsoring an education outreach program to enrich the lives of 100 students, etc. Or a "grass-roots" organization sheltering abused children could have donors sponsor a child or underwrite the cost of a social worker's service for a year. Finding the best opportunities for sponsorship campaigns requires fundraisers to "mine" their organizations by looking hard at what activities are planned. Fundraisers should meet regularly with other staff to keep abreast of developments and to solicit their opinions about which activities might be viable for sponsorship. Once a sponsorship opportunity has been identified, a full-fledged proposal needs to be developed. This should include a budget, a case for giving which shows how the community and the organization will benefit, and a complete explanation of how the sponsor will benefit from the relationship. Next comes the rating and evaluating of prospects. The goal is to narrow the field to the single best candidate and a handful of backups. A standing sponsorship committee of the board of trustees can be a great aid here and provide better leadership of this task than a committee formed separately for each sponsorship project. Committee members, other fundraisers, and organization management should keep well informed about both the kinds of endeavors that area foundations are willing to underwrite and which corporations are likely to be attracted to a sponsorship opportunity. That means staying on top of local and national business news. A firm that may have shown no past interest in supporting your organization (or any other, for that matter) can suddenly find itself needing the recognition and publicity a sponsorship opportunity can deliver. A marketing or public relations agency can be a useful advisor for identifying potential sponsors, and an organization should try to involve such a firm on a volunteer basis, or perhaps even hire such services. Once a sponsorship opportunity has been identified, a general proposal has been developed, and a candidate or candidates have been identified, the proposal must be tailored to fit each prospective donor. In this age of desktop publishing, it is easy to produce a professional-looking prospectus targeted to each sponsorship candidate. In general, sponsorship solicitations should be sequential. Only rarely, if ever, would you offer a sponsorship opportunity to two or more prospects at the same time. The danger is that more than one will accept. However, if the sponsorship is one of a number of similar opportunities, then one prospective sponsor may be able to be moved. If the organization is offering a unique named opportunity, then having to go back to a prospect who is in the process of accepting the offer to say you gave it to someone else has the potential for permanently damaging that relationship. However, each sponsorship opportunity is its own campaign, and you can undertake several sponsorship campaigns simultaneously with other fundraising campaigns. You would do well to allow as much time as possible for a sponsorship campaign. Even a turndown takes time, and a sponsored endeavor usually has a "drop-dead" date — the point after which it becomes impossible to recognize and publicize a donation and include the donor in sponsorship publications such as brochures, schedules, and programs, as well as in activities such as dinners, cocktail parties, and openings. Fundraisers need to plan backwards from the drop-dead date in order to allow time to solicit more than one potential sponsor, if that becomes necessary. Sponsorship campaigns have no ideal length, and because they are conducted behind the scenes, they can go on for as long as it takes to elicit a positive response, or until the drop-dead date has passed. The invisibility of this kind of campaign means that failure causes little real damage, other than the missing funding. Since failure in a sponsorship campaign is "private" and there is no hard-and-fast time frame beyond the final drop-dead date, organizations need to be very careful about not letting sponsorship opportunities slip away. Sponsorships need to be pursued with the same vigor as annual, endowment, and capital campaigns.
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The sponsorship — especially the corporate sponsorship — is a relatively recent fundraising strategy compared to other fundraising endeavors. A sponsorship campaign is like a capital campaign in that it raises money for a specific purpose. Unlike a capital campaign, however, the money raised is not used to purchase an asset, but rather to cover an expense. Like a capital campaign, sponsorships can provide naming opportunities, such as the ABC Corporation Lecture Series, or the XYZ, Inc. Neighborhood Improvement Program, for instance. Sponsorship opportunities such as these often grow out of an organization's annual budgeting process, allowing it to pay for things it would have done even if a sponsor hadn't risen to the bait of a naming opportunity. In effect, these sponsorships permit an organization to package a need as a means of boosting annual support. The idea is to give greater credit and visibility to a sponsor in exchange for an increased contribution. A corporation will look to a sponsorship with a nonprofit organization as the means for the corporation to: 
Examine, analyze, and investigate at all times all that you do in your organization to identify what will appeal to prospective sponsors and underwriters. 
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