Sponsorship Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
Posted: 6/17/2009 10:27:30 AM by
Diane Knoepke | with 0 comments
Despite the fact—or perhaps because—it’s one of the chickier chick flicks out there, Love Story is among my movie favorites. So it did not surprise me when the most famous line (“love means never having to say you’re sorry”) in its Oscar-nominated script flashed across my mind’s ear the other day. It did surprise me when it came to me in a sponsorship context.
I was in Kansas City, where I had the pleasure of participating in the Missouri Assn. of Convention & Visitor Bureaus (MACVB) Annual Meeting. One of my fellow presenters was Doug Price from DMAI (Destination Marketing Assn. Int’l), who spoke about trends and the future of destination marketing. Toward the end of his talk, Doug mentioned the advocacy efforts undertaken by the Seattle CVB and other cities (Indianapolis, etc.) to make the case for tourism—not just to prospective tourists, but specifically to local residents. I checked it out, and I found Seattle’s “Why Tourism Matters” campaign (www.whytourismmatters.org) to be an aspirational model for the case organizations need to make in support of—rather than in defense of—their marketing efforts.
So often when organizations do tell the story of their sponsorship programs, they take an apologetic tone. Many organizations recognize corporate sponsorship in much the same way pharmaceutical companies disclose potential side effects of their medications—it’s clear it isn’t the thing they want to be talking about. Instead, we need organizations to get ahead of the critics, legislators and haters to talk about what sponsors are doing for the organization and what the sponsors receive in return. If we cannot transparently communicate “why sponsorship matters” then we should not be engaging in the relationships anyway.
The Seattle tourism advocacy campaign uses facts and figures, impact metrics, and engaging creative to tell its story. The same mix works well when applied to the sponsorship conversation.
Here are a few examples that illustrate good sponsorship work in the same spirit:
Sponsor Recognition duration: 1:05
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Filed under: cause marketing, destination/tourism, nonprofit, associations