Why clubs and federations need to evaluate their value

Following my recent article on why sponsorship proposals get rejected, I received numerous requests to review proposals in the hope that I would be able to advise on their chances of success.

Sadly, I wasn't able to assist, as it takes several steps to get to a good proposal. Many clubs, federations and event organizers unfortunately skip all these steps and assume by creating and naming sponsorship packages Gold, Silver or Bronze sponsors will start running over each other to sign up.

Let me start by stating the obvious, sponsorships are not donations, a sponsorship agreement is a mutually beneficial partnership between the sponsor and the club or Federation.

The club gets the necessary budgets to run its activities and the sponsors gets a return on its investment (ROI).

Majority of our sponsorship funds come from marketing budgets controlled by marketing directors or managers depending on the size of the organization.

These managers are tasked with creating campaigns of their products that will lead to an increase in sales. That's their only objective. They do not care for your sport or medals.

As marketing managers we may give nice speeches about our noble intentions for our youth and country, but it all amounts to the bottom line.

So while approaching a marketing manager, one must be aware of the many competing options available. The federation must demonstrate that the sponsorship will deliver a better return than other options.

As an example, a Billboard placed along Thika Road will cost approximately Sh150,000 per month. The road enjoys 75,000 cars per day, conservatively providing visibility of at least 1 million people per day.

Alternatively the manager may also consider a full page newspaper advert at a cost of Sh500,000 with a reach of more than 1 million people per day. Just to mention a few.

Clearly a football match or event with 3,000 spectators cannot compete with a billboard. Hence clubs, federation and other rights holders must offer more than just visibility. They must provide unique touch points to justify the millions the request for.

Given the scenario, the first step in creating a sponsorship proposal is conducting an asset audit.

Simply put, what does the club have that a sponsor is willing to pay for?

To illustrate this point, a couple of years we organized an oncology conference and one of our tasks was raise funds from sponsors to meet the budget.

The conference was going to bring together 200 doctors working in this field for two days. Clearly we didn't have the numbers to compete with the smallest billboard on Thika road, but we had almost all the doctors treating cancer in Kenya in one room for two days. That was our biggest asset.

The next step was to ask ourselves, who would be interested with this asset? Clearly not Safaricom. Once we established who the potential sponsors were, we had to package this asset in a manner that would attract them. Merely having 200 doctors in the room wasn't enough, our potential sponsors wanted more than a banner in the room. They wanted an opportunity to engage these doctors.

We also needed to establish what kind of budgets such sponsors are willing to spend on a single event.

It doesn't matter how good your assets are; marketing budgets are limited, and good manager will want to spread his spend across many platforms.

And to our disappointment in this industry sponsorships of more than Sh500,000 were rare, we had to create packages in a such that could attract at least 10 sponsors at this level, and 10 more at lower level in order to meet our Sh10 million budget.

Clubs and federations must hence look beyond visibly at their venues unless they are able to attract TV viewership. They can create opportunities for sponsors to engage with fans at the events and in between matches.