Sponsorships

Legal Context
Sponsorship Marketplaces
Best Practices

Legal Context

• What's in a Nonprofit's Name: Public Trust, Profit and the Potential for Public Deception: A Preliminary Multistate Report on Corporate-Commercial/Nonprofit Product Marketing Advertising of Commercial Products
  The use of partnerships between commercial entities and nonprofit organizations to market commercial products using the names and logos of the nonprofit organizations is a growing trend that raises significant legal and policy concerns.

• Legal issues in sponsorship: get it in writing
  Sponsored organizations, as well as sponsors, sometimes wonder if a contract is really necessary to define the relationship between the two parties. The answer is, "Absolutely!"

Sponsorship Marketplaces

• IEG, Inc. (products, services and advocacy for sponsorships)
  This Web site and accompanying publication (IEG Sponsorship Report) are organized to help match corporate sponsors with sports, arts, cause, and entertainment events. There is useful information about the field of sponsorships and opportunities to list events or causes for sponsorship. IEG Sponsordirect (http://www.iegsponsordirect.com/) is an example of a digital marketplace for buying and selling sponsorships.

Best Practices

• "Sponsorship or charitable contribution --- what's in a name?"
  Sponsorship? Donation? Partnership? Corporate philanthropy? Does it really matter what we call it? The answer to the question is, "You bet it matters." And the reason is very straightforward: The failure to understand the nature of a particular type of funding can lead to a failure to get the funds.

• Suggested steps for creating a successful sponsorship partnership
  There are three key periods in designing effective sponsorship relationships that last well beyond the initial presentation. These stages of development are captured in the acronym AIM: reaching Agreement, Implementation of the program, and Measurement of progress and results. Here's a checklist for event organizers covering proven activities that will help secure a win-win agreement with the right business sponsor.

• Corporate Sponsorship Best Practices: Better friend-raising leads to better fund raising
  Sponsorships can add rich value to a company's employee care, customer care and community care priorities. Care is a key success factor in an organization's choice of a sponsorship with which it is willing to associate its name, its money and, most importantly, its people -- their time, their effort and their expertise.

• Preparing the sponsorship proposal
  Sponsorship proposals are very individual documents. They are specific not only to the sponsorship seeking organization but also to the specific corporation to be approached. For sponsorship investments over $1,000, there is (or should be!) no such thing as a generic proposal.