Local Fairs and Festivals Lend Themselves to Partnerships
Posted: 11/17/2009 3:32:32 PM by
Vinu Joseph | with 0 comments
Recently I had the opportunity to speak at and attend the annual convention of the Michigan Festivals & Events Association. With an audience of local events—most operating on shoestring budgets and almost exclusively volunteer-run—I expected to find a predominance of cookie-cutter sponsorships, mass-mail proposals etc.
While I came across several sponsorship don’ts, I was overwhelmed by the interest and enthusiasm for building genuine partnerships with local businesses. For the most part, these events are designed to draw tourism business to small towns throughout the state; so their success has a direct impact on local businesses, whether they are sponsors or not. While cash is still king, these events are also looking for ways to build buzz and drive attendance—objectives that don’t always demand cash. Such events would certainly seem ideal opportunities for events and businesses to collaborate.
As my colleague Rob Campbell noted recently, grassroots properties can be great incubators for partnerships. Perhaps because these events are often run by people with other full-time careers, they may be actually be more apt to understand business issues and inclined to think of creative ways to partner. Rather than looking at a sponsorship transaction based on a defined amount of cash for a defined amount of benefits, both sponsors and properties could be better off looking at resource exchanges.
For example, a local event may have a volunteer board filled with purchasing influencers, while a business may possess communication vehicles to help promote an event. Or several businesses could collaborate to offer prizing for an event-related promotion—like a hotel, restaurant and spa putting together a set of weekend hospitality packages—while the event would take responsibility for executing the promotion. The typical trappings of sponsorship—in the form of signs, display space and tickets—may not even be part of these conversations, though they could certainly add depth in some cases.
Such relationships may not fit easily into a standard packaging model and may not lead directly to big sponsorship dollars. However, such deals are often the glue holding an event together. They can also provide a means to reach new audiences and ultimately grow the event.
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Filed under: events, in-kind, local, packaging, selling, assets