Evaluating Failure

Earlier this year, Janet Gadeski, president of The Hilborn Group passed along a great article. It was about Engineers without Borders and their experience with corporate sponsorship. As you will see, their foray into this area failed. But it was positive-they learned from the process.

At the Partnership Group – Sponsorship Specialists™, we work with clients to help them build sponsorship programs that work. We determine what they have to sell-their unique assets, programs, and properties. Then we determine the value of those assets, which in turn allows them to understand how much revenue they should and can generate from corporate sponsorship on an annual basis. Then we help them build internal capacity to prospect, do discovery sessions, build proposals, close, and deliver on expectations. Then we encourage them to do what Engineers without Borders (EWB) has done-determine success or failure and why certain outcomes occur

I truly commend EWB on its review, outcome, and desire to “learn to grow up.” Here is the article posted by Simon Fauvel, Patrick Miller, Lauren Quan, and Sierra Jensen from the EWB National Conference Planning Team 2013.

In October 2011, a group of current and former EWB leaders came together to plan and organize EWB’s 2013 National Conference. We aimed to host a conference that would set a new standard for our organization, establishing a new benchmark for professionalism. EWB was growing up, and we wanted to make sure that its conference would too.

Our team grew through the fall of 2011 and finally met in Ottawa in January 2012. Despite being anxious about the work ahead, we were confident that we could achieve our goals.

We were incredibly ambitious. Unfortunately, our professionalism and execution did not live up to our ambitions. These shortfalls manifested themselves in many aspects, but especially in our sponsorship efforts.

We had a grand vision to connect our new corporate partners to EWB in ways more substantial than ever before. Our team was excited to embrace the idea behind Invested Partnerships, a new direction for EWB’s fundraising team. Our partners would share their expertise about running projects and building teams; we would create spaces for poignant conversations and open dialogue; and we would make sure all sponsor delegates had enough information and context to participate in the conference community.

As we approached the deadline for conference planning, we were a long way from achieving our goals, and our ambition had disappeared.

We struggled to communicate our partnership vision to our sponsors in a way that made sense to their representatives. We failed to bridge the gap between their perception of EWB and our goals. We also didn’t give our partners the basic information they needed to fully invest in their experience with us. Because of these failures, corporate representatives were not set up to give the presentations that would connect with the conference audience.

We also struggled internally to meet our own timelines for creating and articulating the ways for sponsors to contribute to the content and atmosphere of conference. We operated in a detrimental environment of last-minute planning, which did not help in working with external stakeholders.

Despite having clear deadlines, we kept pushing them back until we ended up against the December wall; while we worked hard to pull everything together in the last few weeks, our corporate contacts and sponsor delegates were too busy finishing their own projects leading up to the holidays. Our last-minute efforts to fix our mistakes turned out to be too little, too late. Our partners did not have enough time to make the most out of their experience with us.

In short, as a team, we were unprofessional. We didn’t provide our partners with the information they needed. We left everything to the last minute. We made promises we didn’t keep. Our lack of professionalism hindered our dreams and hurt our corporate relationships.

As leaders, we’re learning to respect our partners and to meet and exceed the promises that we make to them. We’re learning to respect each other enough to meet our internal deadlines and quality standards. We’re learning that working in an organization of volunteers cannot be an excuse for unprofessional practices. We’re learning to grow up. 

These are just one person’s thoughts. Yours are welcomed as well. Please add your thoughts or comments below. Thank you for reading and your feedback.

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