Pursuing Partnerships

Long before she was the executive director of the Uptown Association, Cindy Fitzpatrick secured her first event sponsorship. “I was in charge of a women’s 10K running race many years ago,” she recalls. “We had the perfect sponsor, but they gave me two years’ advance warning that they were going to leave, so we started looking for new sponsors.”

She and her co-producer found a likely candidate, and they booked a lunch. “We told him about the event, and we told him how much the price was,” she says. “And he just said, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’ It was so easy. Afterward I joked with my co-producer, ‘Maybe we should have asked for more money.’ But since then, I’ve learned the hard way that you get a lot of ‘nos’ before you get a ‘yes.’”

In her position with the Uptown Association, Fitzpatrick organized Minneapolis’s annual Uptown Art Fair. (She resigned her post in April.) Like others in the event planning field, she learned from experience that a sponsorship agreement must be a marriage of equals. It’s a transaction in which both event and sponsor must see tangible benefits. And increasingly, event planners have to be creative and flexible in order to deliver the value their sponsors require.

The Search is On

The first step in the process is locating compatible potential sponsors. Fitzpatrick says it helps to research what area businesses are up to: What are their hot new products, and what demographics are those products aimed at? Would those companies be appropriate partners?

Alignment of demographics is not the only consideration. When it comes to events hosted by nonprofit organizations, there’s also what Andrea Nelson, business development manager at StoneArch Creative, a marketing and event company in Minneapolis, calls “alignment of mission.”

“So much of corporate sponsorship revolves around cause marketing,” she explains. “I think any organization or nonprofit really needs to be thoughtful and to develop a kind of strategic sponsorship plan—one that looks at like-minded organizations and determines what those organizations can give in the way of merchandise or funds, but also what benefits those organizations will derive.”

Don’t fall into a rut, Fitzpatrick says. Be creative with your mix of sponsors. Don’t just pick the same companies that sponsor all the other local events like yours.

“There’s no one list you can buy that will give you all the people you need to go after,” says Char Mason, owner of Char Mason & Associates, LLC, an event production firm in St. Paul. “I think it’s a lot about relationships. You need to figure out who within [your] organization has what relationships, and then approach [your sponsorship search] through that route.”