Article Summary: Knowing how to build enticing event sponsorship packages can increase event revenue and outcomes before the event even happens! For better sponsors, you should know exactly what makes a good sponsor, how to build effective packages, and how to solicit sponsorships.
If you’ve ever been to a big, flashy networking mixer, nonprofit fundraiser, or industry conference, and thought, “I wish I could afford to throw something like this,” I have good news for you:
You can.
Think about the last event you were at that completely blew you away.
Have it in your mind?
Good. Here’s what you should know: There’s a good chance the host didn’t pay for all of it.
Instead, they probably supplemented their event budget with donations, vendor income, and sponsorship packages.
And those sponsorship packages can be huge. When done correctly, they have the potential to make your events profitable before they even take place.
You can make it happen.
All you need is to know how to build enticing event sponsorship packages.
Keep reading to learn more:
Table of Contents
What Is An Event Sponsor?
How to Identify the Perfect Sponsor
How to Create Sponsorship Packages
How to Build Unique Sponsor Packages
How to Solicit for Sponsorship Packages
Find Event Sponsor Support
What Is An Event Sponsor?
Before we get too far along, let’s define what a sponsor is—and how it’s different from an event partner or vendor.
Partner - A partner is someone who’s throwing financial and logistical support into the event. As a result, they have a say over the planning process, vendors, sponsors, and run of show (how the day actually goes). In simple terms: A partner is someone who wants to throw a great event as badly as you do.
Vendor - A vendor is someone who pays to be present at the event, where they can sell directly to attendees. Your vendor packages can potentially supplement the revenue you generate through sponsorship packages. While this can deliver a major revenue injection, we generally find sponsorships are more lucrative.
Sponsor - A sponsor is someone who pays for advertising and marketing through your event. Generally speaking, they won’t have any influence over how your money is spent overall or how the event is planned or coordinated—though some exceptions may exist. In exchange for their funding, they receive a certain number of benefits and opportunities, which could look like:
- An opportunity to speak in front of your audience.
- Signage, banners, or SWAG at the event.
- Call-outs in social media posts before, during, and after the event.
- Logo placement on event t-shirts, programs, and email blasts.
- Access to audience contact information.
What you offer within different levels of sponsorship and different sponsorship packages is all up to your organization. See How to Create Sponsorship Packages for more details.
How to Identify the Perfect Sponsor
Not every sponsor is a good sponsor. In fact, the wrong sponsor can dilute your message, confuse your audience, or create conflicts with other partners and vendors.
Before you start reaching out, it’s important to define what makes a great sponsor for your event.
Here’s what I always recommend thinking about:
1. Look for Values Alignment
The best sponsors share your organization’s values and mission.
If your event is centered around entrepreneurship, for example, a local bank, accounting firm, or business software company might make sense as a sponsor. If your event focuses on wellness, then fitness brands, health providers, and healthy food companies may be a natural fit.
When sponsors align with your event’s purpose, the relationship feels authentic to attendees—and the sponsor gets far more value from participating.
This alignment also makes sponsorship conversations easier. Instead of simply asking for money, you can position their support as an opportunity that helps both organizations reach the same audience.
2. Prioritize Audience Relevance
A sponsor should want access to the people attending your event.
Think carefully about who your audience is and what they care about. If your attendees are young professionals, companies offering financial services, career development tools, or networking platforms may see strong value in sponsoring.
If your attendees are families, you might focus on local businesses, community organizations, childcare providers, or educational services.
The more relevant your audience is to the sponsor’s ideal customer, the easier it becomes to sell sponsorship packages—and the more eager sponsors will be to say, “Yes!”
3. Avoid Conflicting Sponsors
Another important consideration: competition.
Most sponsors don’t want to share the spotlight with direct competitors. For example, if you already have a local bank as the title sponsor, it may be difficult (and borderline unethical) to sell additional sponsorships to other banks. (And that title sponsor could threaten to back out if you do.)
To prevent this problem, many events offer category exclusivity, meaning only one sponsor per industry. This increases the perceived value of the sponsorship and can make it easier to close deals.
4. Look for Complementary Businesses
Some of the best sponsors are companies that naturally complement your event or your vendors.
For example:
- A catering company sponsoring a food and beverage experience
- A brewery sponsoring a networking happy hour
- A local fitness brand sponsoring a 5K race
These sponsorships feel organic because the sponsor’s product or service naturally enhances the event experience.
5. Be Honest About Value
Finally, remember that sponsorships are not donations; they’re marketing investments.
Your responsibility as an event organizer is to make sure sponsors receive meaningful exposure and opportunities to connect with attendees. That means being transparent about your audience size, marketing channels, and promotional plans.
The more honest and clear you are about the value sponsors will receive, the easier it becomes to build long-term relationships and secure sponsorships year after year.
Once you’ve identified the right types of sponsors, the next step is building sponsorship packages that clearly communicate that value.
Related Reading: How to Host A Nonprofit Fundraiser for Incredible Results
How to Create Sponsorship Packages
When it comes to pricing out your sponsorship packages, here’s what you need to remember:
Your sponsorship packages have to be more valuable than spending the same amount of money on digital ads, billboards, or other marketing efforts.
Think about that for a second: Where can you generate value for your sponsors?
Depending on the size of your organization, email list, and social media following, you might be able to leverage:
- Your website—through blogs, landing pages, banners, and other assets.
- Your social media accounts—through collab posts, promotional posts, reels, and other content.
- Your email—through newsletter call-outs, email blasts, drip campaigns, and sharing addresses collected from the event. (Important note: Your attendee registration should be clear that their contact information may be shared with partners and sponsors!)
- Your phone numbers—through targeted text campaigns and sharing phone numbers collected from the event.
- Your postal addresses—through mail campaigns and sharing attendee addresses.
- Your signage—You may promote sponsors through the signage at your facility or during the event itself.
- Your press outreach—If you plan on securing press coverage, your PR can highlight your sponsors, giving them valuable reach.
Expressing Value
While reaching out to potential sponsors, consider outlining the stats of your audience and potential event attendees—so sponsors know exactly who they can market to through you.
If you have the details, you might choose to emphasize:
- The current number of email subscribers, and their demographic information (gender, location, age, income, job title, etc.)
- The current number of phone numbers, and their demographic information
- Your current address list, and the homes’ demographic information
- Your current social media follower count, and your follower demographics
- Your predicted attendee numbers, and the predicted attendee demographics
- How you plan to leverage email, phone numbers, addresses, social media, and other channels in your event marketing.
Through your combined channels, sponsors may be capable of reaching hundreds or thousands of people within their target audience.
But that’s not all. You could also add in perks such as:
- Free event tickets.
- Free event swag.
- Free event parking.
- Access to the event photography and videography.
How to Build Unique Sponsor Packages
Many organizations offer tiered sponsorship packages, where the more money a sponsor pays, the more exposure and perks they receive.
Historically, these have been provided through some variation of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels—but there’s a more current trend to be aware of: Instead of focusing on precious medals, the “cool” thing now is to allow sponsors to pay for a specific aspect of the event so they know where their money is going.
So, you might still have “tiers,” but each tier pays for an increasingly more expensive portion of the event. For example, instead of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum sponsors, you might have:
- Food & Beverage Sponsor
- Audio/Video Sponsor
- Stage Sponsor
- Venue Sponsor
What we’ve found: Sponsors like the bragging rights of being able to say, “Hey, we paid for the stage at this event.” Plus, their logo will be plastered all over the stage—a major focal point for the event.
Pros & Cons of Each Sponsorship Package Approach
Of course, there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach. What to keep in mind:
Traditional Packages (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum)
Pro: It’s easier to sell multiples of each tier, which can generate additional sponsorship revenue.
Con: Sponsors aren’t always sure where their money’s going.
Event Expense Packages
Pro: Sponsors might be more eager to buy since they know exactly where their money is going.
Con: It’s tougher to sell multiples of each tier, which could cap your potential sponsorship revenue.
If you feel strongly about the tiered approach, but don’t want companies to scoff at the traditional names, you could get creative and use names that are central to your brand or event theme. For a cyber security summit, for example:
Level 1: Malware Police
Level 2: Firewalls
Level 3: Intrusion Detectors
How to Solicit for Sponsorship Packages
Here’s how to jumpstart your sponsorship opportunities:
1. Start With Your Existing Relationships
You know how that old maxim about planting trees starts? The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago…
Well, it’s a similar story for selling sponsorship packages: The best time to start is before you even have them available.
If you run events with sponsorship opportunities, you should focus on building relationships all year long. When you’re looking for sponsors, those relationships should be your first line of outreach.
2. Put On Your Sales Hat
If you’re reaching out to new potential sponsors with whom you don’t have a pre-existing relationship, you should focus on traditional marketing and sales best practices.
For example, consider the following tips:
1. Lead with the values alignment. We’ll talk about the marketing opportunities in a moment, but one of the first things you mention to potential sponsors you don’t have a relationship with is why sponsoring your event makes sense.
Your organization has values, and your ideal sponsor has very similar values.
Highlight that value alignment early on in the conversation so they feel emotionally connected to the event.
2. Focus on marketing opportunities. Your sponsorship packages should highlight the value of becoming a sponsor, but you can also call out those perks here. For example, you might be able to say:
- We’ll highlight your company in each of the five promotional emails we send to our 15,000 subscribers.
- We’ll include your logo and a link to your website on our website homepage, where we call out the event. Our homepage receives 4,000 visitors per month.
- We’ll publish 5 promotional posts to our social media followers ahead of the event. We have 10,000 social media followers across Facebook and Instagram.
3. Emphasize the hype. If you’ve already begun marketing your event, highlight:
- Ticket sales
- Social media engagement (especially shares and reach)
- Other committed sponsors
- Press coverage
Showcasing the momentum demonstrates potential value—and it entices potential sponsors to jump in before they miss the opportunity.
3. Reach Out Strategically
With everything else out of the way, it’s time to reach out to potential sponsors. Once you’ve tapped your network of trusted relationships, it’s time to explore other opportunities.
Our recommendations:
1. Create a call for sponsorships. Promote sponsorships through your social media, email, networking groups, and other channels. You don’t want to spend a ton of money here, but you do want to try to get as many eyeballs on your message as possible.
2. Move to direct outreach. There’s no one way to do this, but think about it as you would a normal sales process. Now, there’s a ton of psychology that goes into effective sales outreach—and we won’t get into it here—but we recommend a multi-channel approach.
So, for example, if you hit up someone on LinkedIn, immediately follow up with an email—and reference that LinkedIn message in your subject line and email body. You could even try giving them a phone call the next day if you don’t hear back.
4. Follow up
After the event, it’s important to reach back out to your sponsors with a genuine note of gratitude. The outreach doesn’t have to be intricate or expensive; an email or mailed note would do the trick.
Note: They should have felt that their contribution was worth it well before this moment anyway, so there’s no reason to try to give them a big gift… unless that’s the sentiment you’re after!
The follow-up “thank you” helps to bolster your relationship with the sponsors and maybe give them some incentive to consider sponsoring your organization again in the future.
Remember, it’s important to start scoping out sponsors for an event months ahead of the event itself. Now is a great time to start that process for your next event.
Speaking of sponsors for your next event, this is also the perfect time to reach back out to the businesses that weren’t able or interested in contributing to this event, but could potentially help out next time.
Send them pictures, stats, quotes from attendees, and anything else you think might give them just a little bit of “FOMO” for next time. Couldn’t hurt, right?
Find Event Sponsor Support
You don’t have to tackle event planning, coordination, and sponsorships on your own. We can help.
Contact us to get started.
