Association Services

Is your association dramatically under leveraging its sponsorship income potential?

Sponsorship is the fastest-growing form of marketing, and association sponsorship is one of the fastest-growing forms of sponsorship.  In 2010, despite a flattened economy, North American associations and membership organizations cashed in on $514 million in rights fees paid to them by sponsors.  And according to sponsorship industry think tank IEG, association sponsorship spending is expected to rise 3.6 percent in 2011 to top $543 million in value to associations.

In last year’s recession, sponsorship trended flat while other forms of media and promotional spending took a beating.  In 2009, flat was up.  Since then, sponsorship has recovered more quickly than its competitors, and sponsors appear eager to increase their sponsorship budgets.  The point is that sponsorship continues to out-perform all other forms of marketing, recession or not. 

Sponsorship is growing faster than advertising, direct-mail, sales promotion, internet spending and all other forms of marketing because it works.  Trade and professional associations are benefitting because they provide a measureable path to sales revenue for sponsors. 

Unfortunately, not all associations are benefitting from this wave.  Too many are stuck in the old mindset that sponsorship consists of selling one-time support for events and shows, meetings and cocktail parties.  Or sponsorship takes the form of transactional relationships where sponsors are given free access to association memberships, paying only if the members buy the sponsors’ products. 

These forms of association sponsorship can have a valuable role to play in the association sponsorship mix. But neither sponsorship model adequately accounts for an association’s tangible, measurable, concrete potential to help sponsors market services to association members. 

The new association sponsorship model that’s skyrocketing through the business-to-business sponsor community features comprehensive, multi-year sponsor commitments that are strictly controlled by associations.  The model adds welcomed and tangible value to association members.  It enhances associations’ value propositions, equity and integrity to members and exhibitors.  The new model also valuates associations’ too-often-ignored intangible value, which brings yet more revenue to the table. 

Associations that embrace the new model dictate to sponsors the tone and terms under which sponsors can communicate with members.  And by understanding their objective value as a means for business-to-business sponsors to reach prospects, associations may charge competitive rights fees which may be much higher -- over much longer periods of time -- than the fees to which they are accustomed.

Another benefit is that the new model drastically reduces association staff churning time, selling the same old sponsorship opportunities year-after-year.  With the new model, comprehensive multi-year sponsorship commitments ensure that your staff can devote its time to other projects.

And if you believe that your current sponsors are tapped out, you should know that revamping old sponsorship programs with updated concepts and value is a powerful means to reinvigorate and up-sell your existing and recently departed association sponsors, in addition to attracting new sponsors.

Adapting to the new association sponsorship model enabled the Self Storage Association to increase its sponsorship revenues from $72,000 in 2004 to $800,000+ in 2008.  Ditto the American Diabetes Association, whose sponsorship revenue – aside from all other traditional fundraising means – grew from 0 in 2005 to $2.6 million in 2009.  Same goes for the Association of National Advertisers, who saw its sponsorship revenue jump 50 percent from 2009-2010, and the Honda Los Angeles Marathon, which experienced a 300-percent leap in sponsorship revenue from 2009-2010.  Even the Boy Scouts of America lit that new campfire, by adopting these principles and rocketing from zero to $12 million in sponsorship revenue from 2008 to 2010. 

One of our clients, the National Electrical Contractors Association, grew its sponsorship revenue by more than 800 percent in six months as a direct result of SponsorLogic’s work in applying the new model. 

Since 2008, SponsorLogic is directly responsible for driving more than $2.4 million in cash sponsorship revenue to NECA, thanks to NECA’s quick engagement of SponsorLogic’s recommendations.

SponsorLogic’s popular Association Sponsorship Valuation Report will provide your association with clear, objective, defensible, market-validated packaging and pricing of your sponsorable assets.  Our research is based on what’s selling, for how much, in today’s competitive association sponsorship marketplace.  Our work is validated with private research, and it’s based on giving you what you need to benefit from fast-changing association sponsorship dynamics.

 If your association is interested in surfing this new wave of interest in association sponsorship, contact SponsorLogic President Mel Poole today.  SponsorLogic has a repeatable, predictable path to association sponsorship success.