One + May 2011 - (Page 47)
Companies do not want to sponsor your event anymore. They want to sponsor the community and activities that your event supports, and they want to do it in a way that demonstrates their real participation in your world.
jobs, competitions for innovative work and exclusive access to unaffordable places. As our VP well understood, money spent on these sorts of things pays off. The business world is changing, everyone wants to be worthwhile and you have the ability to make that happen. Events get paid for in three ways: by the organizations hosting them, the people coming to them or the companies sponsoring them. If you’re throwing an event, don’t waste your time looking for subsidies. Your event is a gift for your clients. If you’re funding through admission, then you already know not to get stuck in that weird middle-ground where you put what amounts to ads or “sponsored panels” in front of your paying audience. To the attendees, it feels like watching advertisements on HBO (which, if it happens someday, will be the end of that model). But even if your registration prices are partly or entirely subsidized by sponsorships, you don’t have carte blanche to advertise on their behalf. Your sponsors understand this. So, create opportunities for every sponsor to add value— visible value—to your events. How? Consider these: Scholarships. Invite a sponsor to pay for students, artists or the temporarily unemployed to attend your event for free or at a great discount on the regular ticket price. Create an online form for people to apply, and let the sponsors pick who it wants to fund. Put the sponsor’s logo on the badges of these scholarship attendees, and thank them from the stage. Depending on how advanced the sponsor is, consider letting it choose the kind of attendees it wishes to support, so that it can meet its overall giving strategy. Do they want to support international travelers? Engineering students? Women? And of course, feel free to charge 30 percent for administrating the sponsorship opportunity. Competitions. As long as we’re at it, create a competition tied to the content of the event. People can work before or during the conference to come up with solutions to the challenge. Academics can submit books or deliver papers, businesses can share case studies and delegates can vote on the winner. A particular sponsor can “own” the competition for the price of the prizes, plus whatever overhead you want for administrating and providing the forum. Marketplaces and Meetings. Most sponsors tend to pay for ancillary, even competing parties along the margins of events, during “dead” times after dinner and before genuine nighttime activities. They spend their money on hotel liquor and finger foods, leaving you with little to show for it and the rest of your event to fund. Turn the main events of the day into sponsored meetings. This gives the sponsor the chance to be the force behind getting things done. The market place or meeting is branded, and the sponsor can point to this activity as the yield of its funds. Content. At the very least, opening and closing keynotes can be sponsored by corporate patrons. This doesn’t mean putting their CEOs up there; it means bringing in an expensive speaker you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. Imagine if my friend told the VP that instead of just purchasing an ad, her company could sponsor an international celebrity, fund the participation of 50 brilliant students or brand the first innovation competition in a particular sector? He would have made the sale, helped the sponsor, funded the event and initiated a virtuous circle that everyone could be proud of.
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author, most recently, of Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back. He teaches media studies at The New School in New York and can be contacted at rushkoff@rushkoff.com.
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of One + May 2011
One + May 2011
Contents
Energy of Many
Impressions
Meeting Design Goes Mobile
Picking Brains
Agenda
Ask the Experts
Thoughts+Leaders
Overheard
Art of Travel
Web Watch
Radical Co-creation
Engagement + Innovation = Wunderbar
Top Spots
Connections
Irrelevant
The Business of Being Social
Safety in Numbers
Ads, Sponsors and Patrons
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
It’s Getting Better All the Time
Blame It on Rio
Ride Free
Learning How the Brain Learns
Just Face It
Becoming Mindful with Your Meetings
Group Think
The Mesh Meeting
Your Community
Making a Difference
Until We Meet Again
One + May 2011
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