Connect the Dots Between Your Strategic Plan and Sponsors

This interview was originally published in The Membership Management Report.

Many associations tend to think of sponsors as collaborators for events and revenue, rather than true partners who share their mission to serve their members, says Michael Tatonetti, founder and CEO of Pricing for Associations (Atlanta, GA).

“By developing sponsor benefits that align with mission and member interest, and not just ‘you're going to get a logo and get exposure’, but ‘you're going to be a part of the heart of this initiative our members care about and covet, and since you are the sole sponsor of it, they're going to build a relationship with you and remember that over the years to come’, you will be much more successful,” he says.

One way to do that, says Tatonetti, is by taking a look at your strategic plan, identifying the actionable items under your initiatives that you haven’t yet invited your sponsors into, and then saying to them, “these are the values that are important to us. What would it look like to include you in those?” 

When they took this approach to sponsor outreach for an association client in 2020-2021, their sponsorship dollars increased 20 percent. It was particularly attractive to their larger sponsors, many of whom increased their spending. 

A driving factor in the appeal of this approach to sponsors, he says, was its competitive nature: “When they heard that there were new frontiers that other sponsors hadn’t yet tapped into, they were excited to be the first to adopt that initiative.” It also helped them meet their own marketing objectives while at the same time aligning with their own values, such as through the sponsorship of a diversity initiative.

On the association side, they were able to continue or launch new programming, and in some cases, it allowed for a reimagining of the delivery of some of that programming without the worry about how they were going to fund it, he says.

Tatonetti shares this advice for other associations: Be intentional in your outreach to sponsors. Don’t present the entire menu of opportunities to everyone. Present two or three and ask them which ones they feel are of interest to them and then invite them to discuss it. Give them a couple of weeks to respond before approaching other sponsors with those same opportunities.