Digital Signature Licitness for Sponsorship Proposal in India

How to eSign a document: digital signature licitness for Sponsorship Proposal in India

in frozen cold snowy Ottawa well it's a bit it's only rainy now but any day now it's going to be a deep freeze but yeah I'm super excited to be here we are going to talk about sponsorship proposals and I will warn you now that this may be a maybe a slightly scandalous webinar or at the very least should present you with some ideas that that you hadn't thought of that might answer the question why the heck aren't people responding to my sponsorship packages so let me introduce myself that's me about 30 pounds heavier than I am now but frankly I look pretty much exactly the same I am a sponsorship expert but I think that a sponsorship eeeek is probably a more appropriate term to describe what I do and who I am I'm the president CEO of a company called the sponsorship collective where we do nothing but sponsorship valuations and sponsorship coaching with clients all day every day and a humongous chunk of the work we do is actually with with charities and not-for-profits so I tell you this because we are steeped in this space we know it very well I'm also the head coach inside the sponsorship Academy where we work with literally hundreds of folks to accomplish our mission which is to help you guys sponsorship seeker there's develop best-in-class sponsorship programs we think a very best place for sponsorship to be done corporate fundraising to be done as in-house and and so this webinar and all of the work we do and the content we provide on our website there as well is all focused on helping you folks do good work better and we also work on both sides of the border Canada the US although as you know I am Canadian and and I make my home here okay so our agenda is actually pretty simple we're going to follow the sponsorship deck structure to guide us through the next 45 minutes or so and then we're going to take some questions so everything we discussed is going to sort of be understood in the context of a sponsorship deck or sponsorship proposal or sponsorship package so I use those terms interchangeably when I say sponsor when I say the word sponsor I mean people in these areas brand management business development marketing product placement sales sponsorship and communications when I say sponsor I do not mean these people foundations corporate giving corporate social responsibility community investment online forms so if you are going here for sponsorship dollars you are missing out big time on the sponsorship the sponsorship world which is literally over a billion dollars a year in Canada grew thirteen and a half percent last year alone double digits every year since 2008 the Great Recession sponsorship does not happen here it happens here brand management business development marketing product placement sales obviously sponsorship folks and communications so as we're talking about the sponsorship package today think about it in terms of these folks receiving it not these folks if you're going to do corporate philanthropy fill your boots most of what we're going to talk about today will not actually apply to the corporate philanthropic side this is all about the sponsorship space so this is what sponsorship it used to be arena I told you I put arrows in my presentation today here's the first big blue arrow sponsorship used to be about a sponsor engaging you the property right we call your events properties we called you folks looking for sponsorship properties it used to be about putting your logo on stuff proud sponsor of increasing awareness hard to measure ROI very competitive and it ignores the value of your brand and audience well this is what sponsorship is today in fact outside of the charitable sector it's been like this for about 20 years the charitable sector I would say is slow to adopt these trends sponsor engages you the property in order to connect with get in front of and engage your audience it's all about your audience it's all about improving their their experience all three parties must win goes way beyond simple logo placement and far less competitive so with that in mind we're going to dive into the sponsorship deck which is without question the most misunderstood tool in sponsorship when I ask folks what now we're a big big group today so I'm not going to ask you to answer these questions in the chat box because I think I will probably end up by killing the charity village team with the landslide of common sense but when I ask people what the purpose of the sponsorship packages they tell me things like to make the sale to list all of the options that we have available to a sponsor to explain our cause and why people should support us the real purpose of the sponsorship package is to outline your audience if you have a 10 page sponsorship package 9 pages should be about your audience define your opportunity notice not your opportunities not your list of things that you're willing to sell in gold silver bronze which you should do away with immediately by the way it's define the opportunity for sponsors to connect with their audience the real purpose of the sponsorship package is to drive people to you to get your prospects to pick up the phone and call you to talk to you about your opportunity it's meant to outline discussions you've already had with your prospects the best time to deliver a sponsorship package is actually after your first or second meeting this is the real purpose of the sponsorship package the sponsorship package does not make the sale it does not include a grid-like gold silver bronze or any other names for your predetermined levels it does not include a cut out to be included with payment I cut this out and send in a check or go online to make a payment here and it most definitely does not try to guess at what sponsors want you want to outline your opportunity outline your audience and then engage your sponsors or your prospects in a conversation sponsorship ages should include and about us page page notice not pages some audience data then a description of your opportunities it should include an ask but it's not what you think and a call to action you want your sponsors to take a particular action so we're gonna we're actually gonna take apart each of these pieces and I can explain to you what each of these sections looks like marina mention you don't have to take notes because you're going to get all this stuff I recording as well as the a PDF of the slide deck and then also I'll send through the trader village gang a link to to download a sponsorship proposal template based on what we're talking about so so you really don't have to write anything down just absorb the information think of questions and fire them over okay so what do you include in the about Us page most people include mission vision history CEO biography list of board members description of all the people you're going to help pictures of all the people you're going to help case for support style why it is that you need corporate support in order to achieve your goals the problem with that is that that is not speaking to a marketing sales audience so an about Us page needs to be short short is good very short is better so one thing that we do the sponsorship collective we represent sponsors as well and before you ask we do not sell sponsorship on behalf of anybody but we do work with sponsors to create their their strategies for investing sponsorship and I can tell you every time a sponsorship package crosses their desk they skip the first two pages they don't even read this stuff they don't want to know this stuff they want to know about your audience so that's why I say short is good very short is better biographies mission vision cause focused this stuff is not necessary include some information about who your organization is sure include a lot more information about the type of event you offer but the goal of the avetis page is to be as short as humanly possible as short as your boss and your board will let you be right they're going to insist that you include 30 pages all about the cause and then you're going to try to rein that in so absolutely positively no more than a single page font 12 with lots and lots of white space you want to be light on this section the reason you want to be light is because you want to to blow your prospects away by using audience data audience data is the key to high value sponsorship period I need to share something with you that I think will make at least some of you uncomfortable I know because when I do this session live I get I get a lot of immediate and live feedback I actually did a session with with a brilliant guy named Brad off Minh Brad runs an organization called spire philanthropy and he used to run corporate the corporate foundation for Mackenzie Investments who are national but out of Toronto and Brad actually used to be one of my when I when I was working for Starlight Children's Foundation he was a sponsor of ours so I've known Brad awhile Brett and I did a presentation and I stood up and said your cause is secondary and Brad stopped me and said actually from our perspective your causes are relevant our perspective being the corporation's perspective not necessarily Mackenzie investment that's perspective your cause is irrelevant so don't freak out let me explain him your cause is irrelevant to the sales team but your cause is highly important to your audience your audience is of high high importance to your sponsor to your prospect therefore you use your cause to attract and define your audience and then you use your audience to define and attract a prospect we're gonna go deeper into this concept but together with your sponsor with your prospect you use your audience to find ways to connect sponsor and audience together use your event your property so your cause brings in that audience they love what you do the sponsor loves those people who love you sponsorship is always this so if my wife tells me I'm a very loud coffee drinker so I'm do my best to sip my coffee off microphone but you do not want to see me uncaf innate it so I apologize if you can if you can hear me sipping sponsorship is always this property you guys your events that your cause the things you do brings in a very particular audience your audience brings in a very specific prospect never this hey Lexus we're going to grant a hundred wishes this year are you interested Lexus says well we have to sell 25 cars this month can you help us and you say well no we have to grant some wishes can you give us your money there's a mismatch now when we fill our sponsorship packages with all of the people were helping and all of our cause stuff this is what we're doing we're approaching Lexus that has a very clear sales target and we're trying to sell them our mission targets it doesn't work always this never this here's an example your sponsorship opportunity or cause your team your event your gala it attracts 40 year old high-net-worth moms who live in the suburbs have two or more kids prefer luxury cars then you reach out to Lexus or Beemer or or Range Rover and ask them their goals they want to sell cars 25 a month you can help connect them to their target audience by helping Lexus or beamer invest in something that your audience cares about when we do this we miss that key element and we assume that our sponsors know we have their target audience and when we do that we look just like the 86,000 other charities reaching out to sponsors and it does not help us stand out from the crowd always this remember sponsorship is about marketing and sales marketing and sales requires a measurable action and a measurable goal X people will take a particular action with the end goal of buying X number of products an action or goal requires a very specific individual or group of people to take that action sponsorship is actually a marketing technique that charities have adopted the majority of sponsorship happening in the world happens outside of the charitable sector with sport and municipalities and retail there are no causes involved in the overwhelming majority of sponsorship transactions so when you're seeking sponsorship you really have to be able to speak this language audience matters because the general public or everyone is actually very low value no sponsors are targeting the general public there are no products that every single person in Canada purchases at the same rate as every other person you would not value an asset or sponsorship opportunity for the same amount if your audience is students versus positions nor would you approach the same sponsors nor would you and gave in the engage in the same type of sponsorship opportunities no audience means you have no value but we don't have a big Ani so this picture is supposed to look smokey instead it just looks kind of weird and pixelated but trust me it is indeed a high-quality image it just doesn't look like it but we don't have a big audience as what I hear all the time from people and that's okay because I'm going to butcher the the Canadian English language for a second here so bear with me it's okay because the riches and then niches if is this thing out of the u.s. it rot minds I know it's not pronounced niche but Americans say niche the rich is in the niche the goal is for you to have the smallest identifiable audience segment that that you can create and still be viable the goal is not to have a hundred million people attend your event the to have a very specific group of people who plan to make a very specific purchase within the next say 18 months and a group of people that you have some sort of influence over right who love what you do so much that they might change a purchase you don't need a giant audience you need the right audience a much smarter person came along many many years before I did named Seth Godin and he writes this the solution is simple but counterintuitive stake out the smallest market you can imagine the smallest market this goes against everything you learned in capitalism school but in fact it's the simplest way to the matter when you have your eyes firmly focused on the Minimum Viable audience you will double down all on all of the changes you seek to make your quality your story in your impact will all get better now many of you may know that Seth Godin has created some of the marketing marketing plans for some of the biggest companies on earth and they are attacking their marketing strategy based on this concept so you coming to I was actually at a conference a couple couple weeks back maybe a month ago and my Nick Nick a guru of CIBC works in their sponsorship to VP of cost answer chef she said to the crowd I don't need you for your media Buy we we can afford newspaper ads that's not what we're interested in in the charitable sector for we want you guys to help us deliver very specific experiences to a very specific group of our clientele the smallest market you can imagine is where the money is it's where the prospects are that's what your sponsorship packages need to focus on now this is an audience 40 year old High Net Worth moms who live in suburban Chicago or Toronto with two or more kids who play baseball 55 year old partner track corporate lawyers who are responsible for bringing in new business and making purchasing decisions before their law firm University of Toronto grads University Vancouver grads who studied who have an MBA who in five years tend to work on vehicle Bay Street in Vancouver making $200,000 a year who buy houses in York Region and commute I guess seven days daily if they're going from York region to Vancouver so that's a bad example but the idea is these folks went to university they studied a very specific program they end up working in very specific industries if you had partner track corporate lawyers or MBA grads from the University of Toronto who work on Bay Street as part of your audience you would only need about 50 of them in order to have a high five figure sponsorship opportunity versus you know forty million people of the quote so-called general population newly-minted trades people who are trying to buy a house work in a particular trade need professional insurance plan to spend $5,000 on new tools this is a starting point for your audience data and what you should be seeking when you know your audience you can do stuff like this so we work with a client to help them to find their audience and I'm going to tell you exactly what to do to define your audience today it's really simple this is not like a special thing that we do it's it's it's doing a survey of your audience will give you all of the data you need to WoW your sponsors so now you know our top secret method it's a it's a $300 Survey Monkey subscription so we worked with a client we did some audience data which is code for we did a survey we found that these folks in their database like skiing and they drove trucks they drove like Chevy trucks so we did a campaign with this organization test drive a truck get a free lift ticket right so people who love skiing go and who are planning on buying a truck anyway go test drive a truck get a free lift ticket every time they did it the sponsor put their name in their database and tagged them as someone who participated in this campaign we measured the outcomes 23 sales directly from this event 23 now 10,000 not 50 million 23 times 30 grand you six hundred and ninety thousand dollars in sales this sponsor does not care about everyone they only wanted to connect with those 23 people who plan to buy a truck this was a hundred thousand dollar sponsorship deal 23 people I'm gonna share with you a story that I personally worked on when I was selling sponsorship we had a organization that taught students financial literacy right we they taught kids how not to go into debt and how to use credit cards properly question to the group do you think that the big banks would be interested in helping kids make better financial decisions in 20 years well yes they were to the tune of 25 thousand dollars it took a year to close a dozen meetings and applications I had to report on impact and how many kids we were helping while on year at a time this was corporate philanthropy and then something hit me we found our real audience and so I went back to that exact same bank that was giving us money through corporate philanthropy I say keep giving us philanthropy we love it we'll keep helping kids but can you put me in touch with the people in your recruiting department and the people who are in your retention Department and the people who are interested in young talent as well as commercial banking because our volunteers who delivered the programming to help these kids make better financial decisions we're up-and-coming professionals they controlled small corporate budgets themselves very mobile in other words they're moving jobs yeah I'm not gonna make any claims about about Millennials at all but these folks I would say fit that so that stereotype right that they're moving around a lot you know I think it's nature of the where they are in their careers young professionals who are moving around a lot set ever were partner track being groomed for leadership 125 volunteers versus 10,000 students this bank paid us 25 grand for 10,000 students how much do you think they paid us to get in front of 125 volunteers as it turns out the riches in the niches 30,000 bucks a year Bank so we moved them up to 55,000 they signed a multi-year agreement one phone call to make the sale just one no proposal no application no online form the sponsor activated which means that they helped us recruit volunteers and therefore paid for a hard program cost volunteer recruiting was our second biggest challenge second only to money so they saved us an additional 20 grand a year so now to our bottom line we were we were plus fifty thousand dollars all I had to do every year is provide a fulfillment report proving that we delivered on the things we promised in our sponsorship package my contact in that case was someone in the marketing and recruiting department not the foundation completely different experience way less time intensive the rich is in the niche alright so we're gonna talk about describing your opportunity when we talk about opportunities in sponsorship we use the term activation an activation is an opportunity to bring your sponsor to your audience I'm gonna share with you a couple of examples but the idea is that you're trying to add value when we I'm just gonna go back to this slide when we brought a sponsor to our volunteers what we did is surveyed our volunteers to ask them what they want more of what they want more training on and why they were even volunteering in the first place was it to just do the right thing or were they actually trying to grow their skillset well as it turns out both were true the right thing and grow their skillset so we brought in a sponsor to help them expand their skillset to give them some extra training to help them network that's an activation so when you describe your ofter opportunities you are not going to describe a grid of gold silver bronze opportunities you're going to talk about ways that you can engage this audience you've just described to your sponsor no grids when you describe your opportunity no list or menu of assets no pricing instead focus on activation ideas case studies outcomes share with you earlier this test drive a truck get a free ski lift ticket idea actually this is listed on on this organization's website as we speak as a case study as proof to future sponsors that they can influence buying decisions so logo placement is a very small aspect of sponsorship it's the most visible component to the public which is why we think it's what we should lead with why we think it's the most important or only element logo placement is the least valuable asset you can offer we were working with a client and they were they were talking to a bank and they submitted a sponsorship package covered in logo opportunities for this Bank and I'll never forget the bank said to our client Jim do you think there's a single person left in the world who hasn't heard of our bank we don't need you to build our brand our brand is solid we need you to convince your audience to do one thing and one thing only apply for a mortgage with us if you can't help us achieve that goal we're not interested you can either help us connect with our target audience or you can't we're not interested in helping more people know that we have a logo so here are some real life examples of activations that come off the page that are not about logo placement so we had this horribly boring industry conference we know because we surveyed our audience and asked them what they thought and they told us they hated them the event they came because they felt they had to I was meeting with a well first my boss told me to go out and get a free photo booth and to call that the photobooth sponsor in other words get someone to donate a photo booth which is a truly terrible idea so instead I reached out to a accounting firm who we assumed might have interested in our audience because our audience intended to like 12% intended to hire new accounting firms in the next 18 months we presented this data to the accounting firm and we also admitted to them that our event was really boring when we asked him how we could work together to make our event a lot more fun and to show off the accounting firm and so what did they say they say we're gonna come we're gonna set up a photo booth and we're gonna dress up like super heroes or villains in this case with that with bein here and we're gonna let people come and try on like commercial-grade superhero costumes and take pictures instead of those stupid mustaches and silly hats so that's what they did and then the the managing partner stood up dressed as bein in Bane's hilarious voice or or fascinating voice I suppose from The Dark Knight series and you address the crowd and said you know we're we're not your average accounting firm we are we're hip or young or cool we just want to help you run a better business we're not gonna talk to you about balance sheets about accounts receivable we're gonna talk to you about how to make your business run better over martinis or cappuccinos so come get a cool picture taken you did this all in Bane's voice come get a cool picture taken and all you have to do is drop off a business card so I did the follow up with these guys they paid $25,000 for this I was going to get a photo booth for free and call them the sponsor and save $300 instead we we got 25 grand for this option so I went and sat down with Bain after and asked how it went and he told me that he had 12 follow-up meetings with people from that session and closed three new pieces of business as a result of this sponsorship and we put logos nowhere no one could even name the the name of this accounting firm that wasn't the point when we asked the attendees for feedback after the event they listed this as the best part of the gala audience wins sponsor wins we won because we we got fair market value for our opportunity I was working with a very small local healthcare charity they came to us and said we don't have anyone in our database we're so small you know we just got nothing companies give to us because we're a good cause unfortunately that was not true companies gave for entirely different reasons and we discovered why when we started to when we did a survey the same survey that you could do tomorrow and in fact we've ran a bunch of blog posts about how to do this so this is not a you know this is this is not me trying to convince you to have us do a survey for you this is us trying to come to me trying to convince you that you should do a survey and you should do it yourself when we did the survey we discovered 30% of their database were high net worth women golfers with kids who regularly went to the spa 96% of whom would change a purchase based on a company sponsoring this charity they went from were small with no audience and no money to building an activation with a high-end home builder for a contest for a day of golf and spas at the most exclusive clubs in the city you do not need a big audience you need a good audience and if you can deliver even fifty High Net Worth moms who live in the suburbs who plan to buy a new house in the next 18 months you're talking about a multi multi-million dollar pipeline you don't need to be big you just need to be good if I ask you to raise your hand if you wanted money from CIBC or are willing to take money from CIBC I guarantee everyone in the room will put up their hand so while these aren't charity activations this is where CIBC is going to get in front of high net worth up for middle-class families Toronto Pearson Airport traveling with your family CIBC will give you a free cart to help you you know carry all of your luggage across the airport going to going for your escy CIBC is going to make it easier for you to get your money on the slopes with a ski through ATM so for everybody out there who claims they have quote families in their database this is what CIBC is able to do on a for-profit ski hill and a for-profit Airport if what you're offering CIBC are just a couple logo placements now or a speaking opportunity or gala you're missing out and this is the kind of stuff that CIBC is up to and that's why it's important in your packages to be describing some of the ways that you've worked with past sponsors and some of the things that your audience wants why were these activation as a success because first and foremost they were based on audience experience and feedback logo placement was a very small part of the package they were very low-cost which is paid for by sponsors anyway but sold for a premium sponsorship fee left the lasting positive impression on attendees and sponsors in every case feedback was outstanding easy for sponsors to see the value easy for you the property to report an impact in ROI right how many high net worth moms did you bring to the high-end home builder how many cars were sold as a direct result of your test drive activation and all three parties win if you are creating a sponsorship opportunity we're not all three parties win you should not move forward with that opportunity audience sponsor and you must always feel like you're getting more value than you're paying for okay so we've covered audience data we've covered activations I'm willing to bet that this that the sponsorship package ideas that I've presented to you now probably do not resemble your current sponsorship packages you do not want to be focusing on your sponsorship package saying things like you know we have 50,000 people coming to our event and and they just really like us you want to get super deep into who they are like 25 or more data points about your audience so marina I don't let me forget I'll send the blog post around as well on how to collect and use audience data for your sponsorship sales so the ask it's not what you think why because the ask is actually done in person and by in person I mean on the phone as well maybe by email maybe but but phone or like face to face is is or Skype I suppose is the way to do it the ask is done in person captured in your sponsorship deck or agreement after you've made a verbal pitch so in other words it you are not expecting or even wanting your sponsor to flip to the last page and say I will I'll here's fifty thousand dollars you have to have a conversation with them always custom never based on predetermined levels your ask is always custom and it of course requires you to know your value that is a conversation for not just another webinar but another probably dozen webinars you have to know your value and I'll also send around a blog post about how to do valuations that's it right that's the ask the husk is a very very simple very simple process it is not about guessing at the right stuff it's not about having you know the right the right cut out that lets people fill it out and send it over to you it's not about asking them to help you achieve your your charitable mission or you know or advance your cause it is about helping them connect to their target market in a way that drives their sales or marketing goals so what the heck is a call to action you know I did a session like this not long ago and and I said to folks you know what do you put what do you put in your call to action page and and most of the comments were well what the heck is a call to action page and so what I realized is that many of us in this space we assume that our prospects know what we want from them we assume that when we send a sponsor something they'll read it and and the cause and the importance of the cause will be self-evident and the fact that you want money will be self-evident that is not the case you have to have a very clear call to action in your sponsorship deck this is how you do it your call to action page is short and sweet you want to tell them outright every single thing we do is custom tell them we want to hear more about your sales and your marketing goals we want to learn more about your audience one contact person with email and direct phone only not you your IDI and a board member just one person think of your call all to action page as a funnel right you've you or your your sponsorship packages of funnel you open by telling them about your event and your opportunity and then you get deeper into your audience data right you show them that you probably have their target customer or that you don't have their target customer and they move on then as the the funnel narrows you show them some of the interesting ways that you can help them connect with their target market you show them some of the outcomes that you can offer like naming rights like speaking opportunities like sampling then what where you leave them at the kind of the base of your funnel is we love the audience those sound like really interesting ways to work together how do I purchase this oh the only thing I can do is contact this one person by email or phone I can't email them and ask them for a price because we haven't actually had a conversation yet the goal is to get your prospect on the phone with you or to get your prospect to meet you in person and tell you what they're looking for so that you can ask probing questions and get to know who their target audience is so you know I saying to Marina that that either we're going to have an absolute barrage of questions throughout and I'm pleased that we decided to hold questions until the end unless there aren't any but this is always like the nightmare of a presenters that you get to the end and there's like there's no questions whatsoever so so I wanted to leave lots of time for questions before we dive into questions it's important that I leave you with the most important piece of the puzzle the sponsorship proposal does not make the sale you do before you ask and say but my board my boss my whomever makes me create sponsorship packages they told me that I have to do it what do what Chris what do I do my answer to you is create the sponsorship package do not get fired make the sponsorship package then I want you to do something very special with that sponsorship package I want you to open the top drawer in your desk I'm going to place the sponsorship package inside of it close it and lock the door lock the drawer go out talk to your sponsors talk to your prospects get to know them in their needs the proposal does not make the sale you do and your proposal must drive people back to you the best sales tool your organization has okay so I'm happy to take some questions now Rina I spoke way faster than I expected to so we have lots of time for questions well that's great because we have lots of questions coming in so I don't think there's going to be a presenter Chris okay let's dive right in so first up a lot of what you were talking about today Christmas sponsorship for events would there ever be a sponsorship for an organization as a whole yeah so so that's a actually I'm glad you asked that question sponsorship is actually not really event based nor does it need to be you know when we looked at the the High Net Worth golfers activation that was not event based those were just donors within there within within the database the sky BC activations also not event based naming rights those are not really event based sponsorship so the answer is yes absolutely sponsorship for an organization as a whole I without question not only possible but common here's the challenge though all of these principles hold true whether it's an event whether your sponsorship property is an event or an organization or a program when I shared with you the teaching young people like the financial literacy folks none of that was event based so so actually in this case I would say you know most of the activations I shared they were not connected to an event or any events but the problem is the challenge is you still need to identify your audience right so when I say audience I mean like your participants your donors your people who subscribe to your newsletter your audience in the broadest sense of that term so you need to be able to identify who they are why they care about your organization and then what you can add to them what you can offer them to make them happier to add more value to their lives if you can't do any of those things through sponsorship of your organization proper then act then you don't have a sponsorship opportunity right it's all about audience and all about connecting sponsor to audience and actually the the test drive a truck campaign was also not event based that was done over the course of a winter ski season where this organization was driving pardon the pun having people to go to the website of this local car company sign up to do a test drive at any point in order to get a free lift ticket so so you know I mean it all boils down to audience and whether or not you can add value if your idea of sponsorship of your event is company gives you money and you achieve your mission then you you will not have a sponsorship opportunity you have a corporate philanthropy opportunity but that is not where that is not the best place to find yourself in the current market focusing on philanthropy okay and now we've had many many questions as you can imagine about how to get started with outlining your audience as well as surveys so perhaps you can just give a brief little summary of that again for sure so we have a highly highly complex strategy for for surveying our audience and it goes like this we purchased a pro SurveyMonkey account for three hundred and fifty dollars a year we whenever we're doing this for our clients or whit I should say with our clients we encourage our clients to do the surveying themselves but we write the survey and we ask them to send out two eblasts one on a Tuesday one and a Thursday and offer people who fill out the survey a chance to win one of three Starbucks gift cards of 25 bucks each total cost to the organization four hundred and twenty-five dollars if you choose to do it yourself so we use a pro SurveyMonkey account to eblasts to the really usually to the entire database and we asked questions that range from you know how old are you - you know which of our programs events experiences have you engaged in when we're working with charities we always say like which programs do you use sometimes that's appropriate you know maybe not it like a food bank but but if people are at a hospital you know you want to know like are they part of the I don't know are they going in for surgery or long hair term long-term care treatment etc so we ask those kind of questions and then we ask some questions like what purchases do you plan to make the next couple of months and if a company were to support this charity or this organization are you yes or no are you likely to change a purchase decision we asked about who the bank with and we basically asked some to tick off you know series of brands that they purchase regularly and that they plan to purchase in the future and in the emails that we send to people send to the database we were just honest with them with our database and say we want to use this to connect with sponsors but we only want to work with sponsors that are in line with your values so help us understand a little more about you and then we also ask questions about like which sponsors you think are appropriate you know cuz some audiences they don't want I don't know pharma and some audiences really want Pharma you need to know that before you reach out I think and it's useful to sponsors and then we ask questions like at our last event or you know kind of your day to day life what what things drive you crazy or bother you what things do you love what could we have more of at our event you know what dominates most of your day at work like we just ask questions about their their experience and you know that's how we found that we had these wealthy women who golfed and went to the spa like that's that's kind of a weird company or at least I thought it was a weird combination and 30% of their database being these female golfers that seemed high we never would have known if we hadn't asked so we actually have written a couple blog posts about this about this big it's building a survey how to use it in sponsorship and full disclosure like we offer this service but it's not what we do like we're a valuation firm we tell we our main goal is to help people understand what their stuff is worth but what we found is that people just didn't have any audience data which is critical to doing your valuations and and finding new sponsors so we basically found ourselves like dragged kicking and screaming into the audience data world and this is why we so we're just happy to give away all of the information because if everyone just knew who their audience was it would actually make our jobs a whole lot easier so we're sort of highly motivated to give away this information so so you know you you actually can't like hire us just to do your audience stuff we don't do that if you get in touch and say how do I do audience down I'm gonna send you the free stuff so we'll just cut out the middleman and I'll have I'll give it to marina and she'll sit it out to everyone that's awesome and I've put a link to Chris's blog in the chat box as well so do you hop over and check that out because there's tons and tons of fabulous information there ok moving on what about sponsorship of free events or non gated events does that change at all no so you know what's interesting I was actually having a conversation with with a us client will remain nameless but but they provide online event registration tools and and you know we were having this conversation about doing a piece of work together and and he said you know it just occurred to him that the event model has changed radically in the last five years he said you know if he were to get back into the event space he probably would never charge anyone to attend event an event again because the money's in sponsorship you know it's not really it doesn't actually matter how much you charge people unless you're trying to make an exclusive event and and make it so that only a very specific group of people can afford to come that's different but the realization was you know what it's actually more about the number of people the type of people and how well you know those people so if a like a like an open gated or an untick ative event is code for we just let people walk in and we don't track who's coming and going that's not good that is going to that's gonna cost you sponsorship because basically what you're saying is we don't know are who our audience is other than they probably like these kind of events you know like street festivals and stuff you definitely want to get some data about about who's coming so you're gonna want to capture email addresses in some way you're gonna want to get people to follow you on social media because when they do that Twitter Linkedin and Facebook actually give you audience data under there under there add sections in your profile so so anyway if you're not charging people to come to your event that's a non-issue I ran this I ran an event where we closed a major sponsor major sponsor for the first time in the events history and I had made some lofty promises about how many people would be attending and about I don't know four weeks out from the event we were nowhere near our benchmarks and so we started contacting Lake associations and groups and membership orgs and just like literally giving them hundreds of free tickets just to get people to come to our event because the money was in sponsorship so you know outside of the advantage of when people buy something you can capture information whether you charge them or not is is a relevant great we've got a really interesting question here from Naomi I'm going to just read it out to you cuz we always aim to honour our donors privacy and anonymity sharing the details of our audience with a corporate entity feels counter to our organization's values how would you navigate this yeah so if it's counter to your organization's values then don't do it but if your organization's values are based on an assumption that your donors do not want to provide you information then I would check that assumption before making a a very costly error so if it is true that your donors who have given you money purely because they believe in your mission are not comfortable disclosing to you the type of car they plan to buy in the next 18 months and would feel betrayed by you if you were to seek sponsorship with that information then your donors are telling you to guess at those things and go seek sponsorship right your donors are saying yes we'll give you our money but we don't want you to go get sponsorship if that's true then actually you should not be seeking sponsorship because if you go it so let's say you have a database who all react negatively to being surveyed in other words you serve who your database and they're like this is crazy how dare you ask us our opinion about the sponsors were interested in and it I haven't seen it but it's possible imagine how much worse they would react if you reached out to a sponsor that they hated or that sort of was that odds with their ethics and then you try to activate that sponsorship by sending an email out to your database about the sponsorship agreement the same database who who would be frustrated with you just asking their opinion you're going to have backlash so if it's true that your database has said or believes that we don't want to like we all want to give you this information so be it you should not be doing sponsorship if you're making that assumption and you believe it to be true then you're doing yourself a disservice unless you can test whether or not it's true and so when we survey we thought were always honest with people and tell them why we're surveying and and we've surveyed a few million Canadians and and close to a million Americans and a handful of Australians and I think we've had I want to say 18 complaints total from literally 3 million surveys that have gone out the door some very very conservative organizations have surveyed so so if you're making that assumption on behalf of your database then then you should actually test that assumption by surveying a subset of your database to see how they react right 500 people at random and send them a survey and see how many people you know react negatively if your concern is about sharing their data will disclose it to them and obviously check with your with your legal counsel to make sure that it's okay to do so but if at the end of the day you have to choose whether or not this is kind of up your alley if it's not something you're comfortable with then what you have to realize is that that you probably don't have an organizational culture compatible with sponsorship which is sort of the the kind of the unfortunate reality however if your if your donors are that passionate about this stuff then you probably have a really solid major gift program and you double down on that it's a great suggestion now on that sort of same topic when you you know we're working on on getting the sponsorships like for instance when you were talking about the superhero photo booths how do you ensure that you're not crossing a line in terms of being a little too salesy perhaps to the audience or that the audience is going to kind of react poorly to what you're doing yeah so it's interesting because the the whole idea around sponsorship is that you're trying to solve a problem of your audience it's the the goal is not to be ace is not to sell it's a it's a marketing technique and so you know if your concern is like my sponsors are gonna show up and just start like hawking their junk at my gala you know then it actually violates that the triple win philosophy right like it has to be right for you and your event and so when I was doing the superhero thing I talked to the to the accounting firm and they were they were clear our goal is for everyone to walk away thinking of us as a cool accounting firm not the stuffy boring accountants of our grandfather's cool hip young business people who just happened to love numbers and spreadsheets that's their goal the audiences goal was to go to this gala and have a good time and my goal was to make the audience happy and to achieve my mission as a fundraiser so my organization's mission and my contribution was to raise money that's how I held my organization achieve their mission if the accounting firm said our goal is to get people on the spot to buy a new package accounting package then I would tell them one that's not a realistic goal for sponsorship and two I would say no thank you because it's not that just isn't how it works you know maybe at a trade show you have exhibit spaces maybe but but the the like the old-school approach of like hard and selling people and trying to force them into purchasing something that hasn't been a part of the sales process for for at least a decade so I have I'm not I'm not so concerned about that really at all but it all comes down to how well you're doing discovery with your sponsors how well you know your audience right they're bored can you help us cure boredom not boy do they want to be pitched a product that they're not interested in and then the last piece I'll say is if 30% of your database drives Lexus and they plan to buy a new car within the next 18 months they're going to talk to a salesperson fact it's going to happen with or without you they have no choice but to go and talk to a salesperson so you can either find a local car company your car dealership that cares enough about their audience to connect with the charity they care about or you can let them sort of go off into the world and take their chances with a salesperson so and then lastly you know if you have a sponsor who's coming to your events or engaging your audience and a hard line sales approach you actually don't really have to worry so much about pushing them away because your audience will do it for you so so yeah you know sort of like preemptively preventing people from being too salesy I'm not sure that that's the right the right approach or the right attitude to go into this with it's more about building a partnership and being the experts on your audience right you you have to be able to resent represent them properly with enough data to do so that's a great perspective and we've got just time for a few more questions here that I do want to try to get through we've had a number of people asking about how to deal with sponsors multiple sponsors for one event who may actually be in competition with one another mm-hmm so that's a very good scenario that's a good place to find yourself so you have multiple sponsors who may or may not be well who are in fact competing with each other so if you can offer something this is where I think evaluation is is critical so if you're finding yourself in that situation you really next thing you need to do is perform a valuation on your sponsorship opportunities why because at some point those competitive folks are going to ask you for our exclusivity and you need to know what the value of exclusivity is so the way that I deal with folks who are in competition with each other actually there was this really it happens a lot in the Association like membership conference space actually right because yet you have a group of people all of whom by like the exact same six products by 20 different companies so all 20 companies want to be there so we'd had this cool event where there were there were I think eight competing companies and so what we said to them was why don't the eight of you each come up with your own cool activation idea on stage so you can't stand up there and pitch anybody your product what you can do though is come up with like a cool idea pitch it to our event planning committee and you can sponsor that one thing so this one group did they were let they're based out of Edmonton which I understand is a may be colder and snowier than Ottawa and they did this like ice dance performance and then there is this this group from Newfoundland and they sent they sent it like a local music musical group to come and sing and they give away free screech which i think is the alcohol the like whiskey or something from Newfoundland so basically every sponsor got like three minutes with the goal of Wanganui heck out of the audience and like winning like kind of like gong show style maybe maybe I'm too old for for for people watching this like I don't know like reality show style where you know they go up for three minutes they do the thing and then they either get boot or cheered off the stage and and compete with each other so we actually involved the competition into the event in other words it's up to you guys to impress our audience and these are the kind of things they like in the case of an exhibit hall or conference you know I've had sponsors tell me look I don't want to be near them like I don't even want to be able to see them from my booth so you have to put them elsewhere and so you just have to do it so if you can't incorporate the competition and they then the solution is exclusivity which is something you definitely should be offering but make sure you value it at a very high premium right if one bank is going to be there to the exclusion of all others they're gonna pay a pretty penny for that opportunity great thanks Chris now the contact person from the charity or the organization that's dealing with the sponsorship does that need to be a senior level person that's working no it can be a manager yeah yep so it should be the person who who can it should be the person who can act as the advocate for the sponsor so you know you pick up the phone the sponsor says look I love these activation ideas here's what we're trying to accomplish as a company do you think that would fit with your with your audience you know here's what we'd like to do the the best response is that sounds absolutely fascinating tell me some of the things you're trying to achieve tell me how you would measure success tell me how you've done this before did it work like what went wrong what went right and then I'm gonna take this internally to the team and let me see if I can make this happen for you so actually not being it either not being a decision maker or being okay about not admitting you're a decision-maker is to your advantage because it lets you get information extract information from the sponsor under the guise well guys is the wrong word because it's in this case it's true under the promise that you're going to advocate internally to try to make it happen for them so don't think of yourself as gatekeeper think of yourself as your sponsors advocate internally so it does definitely does not have to be a decision maker if you are the decision maker it can be a challenge because the sponsor is going to say to you right on the spot I want these things and I want to pay this much can we do it yes or no instead of giving you a chance to go back and do your valuation and and send them some like two or three options at different price points wonderful and our last question lots and lots of folks have been asking about the very first sponsorship package they've never done sponsorship before or they don't have very good data from past you know wins with sponsors yeah how did they get started mm-hmm so I look I didn't clear with them that I could do this but it's available publicly so I'm going to offer it someone who did who did a really really stellar job they've never been a client of ours I'm just an admirer and I said I really like what they've done is the Toronto Fringe Festival I think it's Cody who is their director of development they're not a big group they are they you know I get the impression they recently changed how they do sponsorship so just google them Toronto Fringe Festival have a look at their sponsorship package the way they've laid that out is a perfect example of the process that I'm recommending so don't steal it but look at the approach that they're taking they spend one page or less talking about kind of what they do one two pages talking about their audience and then a page talking about like here's some of the cool things you can do give me a call and let's talk about it that's it's like three or four pages very there's not a ton to it compare that to the Toronto International Film Festival which uses the exact same structure but is like 30 pages long and it's outstanding they go deep into audience data but you don't mistake what I'm saying here or rather I don't want to leave you with the impression that either you're going to make this like juggernaut sponsorship package that talks about your audience or your toast the what I presented here is the is that is the goal right we you have to give yourself permission to learn and grow and gather this information as you go so do what you can now focus on audience data and where you're lacking audience data talk to your sponsors and ask them what else do they want to know about your audience what should you be including in your next survey would they like to add a couple of questions that you'll help that you'll report on anonymously back to them you'll share the results so you can use kind of the newness as a as a way to shape your package but I think the Toronto French Fest has done a like absolutely brilliant job with their sponsorship package and and there are many others out there who are who are doing the same thing or they think they have four pages worth of stuff so they're gonna make it the right stuff great well thank you again Chris for coming back this year and during another presentation for us it's been a pleasure having you speak for us again thank you yeah pleasure anytime great and before we sign off today cuz I am conscious that we're running over time I just want to remind everyone that we will follow up with you by email tomorrow morning with the webinar recording so do watch for that we will have a link to a short survey there if you can take a moment to fill it out that's very helpful for us you'll have an opportunity there as well to let me like sorry let us know if there's other topics you'd like to see covered in the future or perhaps if you'd like us to bring Chris back for another session and so with that I'd like to thank everyone again for joining us today thank you Chris and I hope all of you have a wonderful rest of your day buh bye see you guys