Since January, I have delivered 21 workshops, seminars, keynote speeches and professional development programs to groups and audiences across Canada. That is more than one per week in the first quarter of the year.
These include sessions ranging from an amazing few days in Edmonton at the Alberta Association of Agricultural Societies annual conference to working with Funtastic and the Greater Vernon Chamber of Commerce on a full-day training session; from working with the Town of Hampstead, Quebec to the City of Toronto at an inventory identification and valuation training session; from the Festivals and Events Ontario annual conference opening keynote to the Thunder Bay and Area fundraising conference, and other events in Calgary, Victoria, Regina, Edmonton and Kelowna.
It has been amazing. But there is one underlying theme from many of the attendees. Many of them from smaller organizations come to the session with the thought and belief that they are too small to really get sponsorship dollars. They think they have nothing to sell. They think they have no corporate contacts. What they learn by the end of these sessions is that these are myths.
They can sell sponsorship.
They do have valuable assets.
They can get in the door of corporate Canada.
They learn that they that it is not all about big audience numbers or huge events. It is about reaching the right audience. We worked with a small volunteer-based organization called The Fire Within that raises money for volunteer fire departments. It has no staff and no real assets (they thought) other than logo space to offer. They secured a deal for $300,000 on a cold call! They learned they had intangible and tangible assets to which big Canadian brands wanted access. The Airdrie Festival of Lights is a “smaller city” that hosts an annual Christmas lights festival. It doubled its money by being innovative. Originally, it was raising about $16,000 a year. Through creative asset identification and bundling of assets into packages, it had 31 sponsors at $1,000. Now it has other presenting sponsors and such, and raises over $50,000 a year.
As many of you know, we operate a small two-day conference with just 250 people attending. It is called the Western Sponsorship Congress™. We generate over $80,000 in cash sponsorships per year. Very few of these sponsors are big household brand names. But it is because of these sponsorships that we can offer discounted pricing to delegates.
Most of the small charities I hear saying, “I don’t have big audiences” deliver more people than we do through the Western Sponsorship Congress™, but their entire annual sponsorship revenue is less than we acquire in two days.
If sponsorship is done right, your size or connections do not matter. Follow the proven format—“Know what you have to sell, conduct discovery sessions and custom-build proposals that meet sponsors’ needs”— and you will be able to “show me the money.”
These are just one person’s thoughts. What have you seen?