Services for Sponsors
CHARGE’s sponsorship consultants provide a full array of advisory services. However, our sponsor clients often seek help fine-tuning an existing sponsorship program.
The path to improving a brand’s program takes all or some of the following sponsorship service steps:
Strategic Review
Confirm Your Strategy
Some clients have a robust sponsorship strategy in place. Some have a legacy strategy they want to refresh. Others need a bespoke strategy and want a more focused direction. No matter where you are in this process, CHARGE’s sponsorship consultants can help you with your strategy and confirm its contribution to achieving your goals.
Our Measurement Matrix
In this phase, CHARGE can share its Measurement Matrix with you. “How do we know this thing works?” is a quote usually heard when reviewing a sponsorship budget. After implementing our Measurement Matrix, the sponsorship manager will respond, “Because the KPIs tell us it does.”
If your sponsorship program needs a key performance indicator (KPI) tune-up, we developed the CHARGE Measurement Matrix for you. This service helps clients create customized KPIs to measure and manage their sponsorship program. Starting with your sponsorship strategy, CHARGE leaves the client with its Measurement Matrix dashboard to monitor what’s working in a sponsorship program and what is not. After this service, you’ll be more confident that your sponsorships support your return on investment and return on objectives.
Total Portfolio Review (TPR)
You may be content with most of your sponsorship properties, but some partnerships may require improvement to meet your expectations. Starting from scratch is not an option, but you want your entire portfolio to be robust and efficient. To fulfill this need, we have created the Total Portfolio Review.
The Performance of Each Sponsorship
In the TPR, we review all or a portion of your properties to verify alignment with your sponsorship strategy and positive impact on your marketing challenges. Our sponsorship consultants work in tandem with your team to collect relevant data, analyze the effectiveness of each property, and leave you with detailed recommendations to improve the program or sunset unproductive partnerships.
How Sponsorships Interact Within Your Portfolio
TPR also looks at the “sponsorship fit” of your portfolio: how your properties interact with one another and reflect on your brand. To help you maximize the benefits of sponsorship fit, CHARGE will recommend specific ways each of your sponsorships can add value to your brand image.
Sponsorship White Space Analysis
A sponsorship portfolio can become more cluttered than a garden full of weeds. When confronted with this condition, a sponsor has two choices: either weed the garden of unproductive partnerships or start with a white sheet of paper. We developed our Sponsorship White Space Analysis for those organizations that choose the latter.
Our Sponsorship White Space Analysis starts with a blank sheet of paper. When we complete our analysis, the client has a new portfolio tuned to achieve the objectives identified in their strategy. Our pathway for this customer portfolio design includes the following steps:
- Confirm the client’s strategy, focusing on its target customer demographics and psychographics.
- Identify the client’s current productive partnerships from our Total Portfolio Review for inclusion in the new portfolio.
- Create an “Audience Property Scorecard” cross-referencing the client’s desired audience with high-value new partnership opportunities.
- Recommend new partnerships to add to the client’s redesigned portfolio.
Transition Plan
The only thing constant in life is change. The same goes for sponsorship, as partnerships come and go every day. Our clients occasionally change their sponsorship roster; a good plan is essential for a smooth transition.
CHARGE takes an interdisciplinary approach to crafting its transition plans for clients. For instance, our client’s plans take the following issues into account:
- How is the transition handled from a public relations perspective to minimize potential fallout?
- What financial factors should be taken into consideration?
- What legal hurdles exist that impact the sunsetting of a relationship?
- Are there brand impacts (positive or negative) that need to be managed?
Our sponsorship consultants serve as the client’s quarterback in crafting these plans, integrating subject matter experts (like accountants, lawyers, risk managers, etc.) into the process, and advising on plan implementation.
