How to Find the Right Sponsor for Your Event

Sponsors can help you reducing the overall costs of the event, increasing the number of attendees and improving the user experience.

Let’s have a look at the main steps you should follow to find the best sponsors for your next event!

Understand Who Is Your Target Audience

Figuring out your audience is the first step to choose the right sponsor for your event. Defining your target will help you finding the sponsor that want to reach that specific audience. Once defined, start searching for companies and local businesses that could be interested in reaching it. Remember that the main reasons why companies sponsor events are:

• Build/improve brand reputation
• Boost visibility
• Increase brand loyalty
• Display products/services
• Encourage trials

Identify Sponsors’ Personas

In order to identify the sponsors’ personas, you have to answer this question: “What makes a perfect sponsor for my event?” The answer depends on several factors: size and type of event, audience, benefits from sponsorship, your objectives and so on.

That said, you have to figure out how significant is the investment you want to obtain from the sponsor. Taking into account the size of your event, we recommend you to shortlist the potential candidates based on their dimension.

Large companies may be more likely to make big investment, but can also be difficult to be sponsored by them if you are not well known and relevant in your industry. On the other side, smaller companies may not allocate a big amount for event sponsorship, but they can provide gadget and visual materials (helping you reducing part of your costs) and are certainly more open to raise awareness and display their products.

Reach Out Your Prospective Sponsors

Now that you know who are the prospective sponsors to contact, get on the phone and blast emails to publicize your event as a unique marketing opportunity for them.

If you decide to call them, start with a short introduction, explaining the type of event you’re planning, the audience you want to reach and focus on how they will benefit from it. If they are interested, explain in details every single aspect and try to propose them some good fresh ideas to promote their brand. Once you’ve made all the calls, review your notes and prepare a list of companies you will solicit.

Same rule of thumb if you decide to blast email: be short, concise and focus on the benefits for the companies. Try to customize your emails and make them easy-to-understand. If you’ve already organized events with sponsors, attach a list of the sponsors and a brief description of the target audience you reached.