Happy Halloween – Is Your Sponsorship a Trick or Treat?

Happy Halloween!

I have question for you — Is your sponsorship a trick or treat to your potential sponsors?

I love Halloween.

Why? Well, I love getting the pictures that my sister sends me every year of my niece in her costume… or sometimes costumes. I love the smile on her face in those pictures, and I love how it’s a chance for the family to get together and spend time laughing, smiling, and eating candy!

Tonight, millions of families will go from door to door with the same phrase… “Trick or Treat!”

As they prepare for an evening out as families, I wanted to share a few tips on how to take your sponsorship from trick to treat.

Sponsorship Trick: Offering the same sponsorship benefits year after year.
Did you ever go trick or treating and know that you didn’t want to visit that “one house”? You know, the house that had the candy that you didn’t like every single year and they NEVER changed it?

We had that house in the neighborhood and while we went a couple times, we finally realized that there’d never be the candy we liked there. They unknowingly trained us to expect the candy we didn’t like and, as a result, we stopped going. Are you affecting the bottom line of your sponsorships by offering the same benefits year after year?

Sponsorship Treat: Ask your potential and current sponsors what they want.
I remember a lady by the name of Miss Pat that lived down the street from us in Houston, TX. Every year we’d go to Miss Pat’s house to trick or treat, and every year she’d bring out this bowl filled with different types of candy and tell us to pick a few pieces. We loved going to Miss Pat’s house because we knew we’d have the opportunity to pick the candy we liked best.

In the same way Miss Pat allowed us to pick candy, are you asking your sponsors what sponsorship benefits they’d like? I invite you to have a conversation with your sponsors, and potential sponsors, to make sure you’re giving them the value and exposure they want to reach their business goals.

Sponsorship Trick: (Over) Promising “Huge” and “Massive” amounts of exposure, visibility, and traffic
When building a sponsorship proposal, and the list of benefits that go with it, there are times it can seem difficult to find the right words and value to offer a sponsor. In an attempt to make sure a sponsor understands us, we use lots of adjectives. It’s difficult to prove that a sponsorship property is exciting, fantastic, awesome, amazing, fabulous, excellent or wonderful. What do we do instead? We make a trick, a treat!

Sponsorship Treat: Keep it Simple.
When building your sponsorship proposal and sponsorship marketing plan, keep to the facts and don’t make the story too pretty with lots of adjectives. Provide clear details in your proposal of who, what, when, where, why, how and how much. While the story is part of the sponsorship proposal and sales pitch, the details are what they’re looking for.

I hope these two trick to treat sponsorship tips helped you!

Happy Halloween… oh, and save me some chocolate!

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