Strategic partnerships and sponsorship programs are crucial to the success of nearly every association. Not only do these partnerships offset costs and provide revenue, but partners and sponsors also often provide valuable solutions and thought leadership. Partners and sponsors should be viewed as a member subset: individuals who are paying to receive something in return from your association. Therefore, keeping them happy, being organized, and effective communication is key.

Enter marketing. You will likely rely on the marketing team to implement many of the promised deliverables for your partners. Knowing that, here are some pointers on when, why, and how to effectively collaborate with your marketing team to ensure successful partnerships with your sponsors as well as your staff.

The Process

When it comes to strategic partnerships and sponsorship programs, it’s important to bring marketing in prior to developing any partner packages. Then, once you have determined your offerings, it’s important to continue to include marketing in conversations around deliverable timelines, contract changes, and more.

Because many sponsorship deliverables will be marketing’s responsibility to implement, early conversations can ensure that what you are selling or promising can be met. In addition, the marketing team will have an idea of the best way to streamline these deliverables for partners and sponsors. As they tend to be creative thinkers, they may even have suggestions on how to build packages that maximize offerings and profit. That’s why knowing expected revenue goals and then sharing those with the marketing team from the start is also important.

Early and consistent planning with marketing will result in stronger vendor satisfaction, as well as better communication and cooperation among staff. As you start planning, here are some questions to ask the marketing team:

• How much time lead time do you need from me to implement each deliverable?
• What artwork or graphic needs do you have for our sponsors based on each promised deliverable?
• What is the desired workflow to implement promised deliverables?
• Are there any hard costs we need to consider (e.g., printing, graphic design, mailing, etc.)?
• What else do you need from me or our partners to make this possible?
• Do you have any ideas on how to make this partnership more beneficial to all of us?

What It Looks Like in Action

To see how this could look at your association, let me share an example from my own. Here at the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools, we still publish a print magazine. It’s not only a valuable marketing tool, but members also really enjoy it and find it useful. To help offset the cost of publishing, we rely on vendor ads in the magazine.

Recently, though, we’ve found that many companies don’t want to purchase print advertising, preferring digital instead. And despite our best efforts to sell ads, our vendors simply were not getting approval to purchase them.

Knowing these circumstances, we had a planning meeting between marketing and the person who manages vendor relationships to determine how we could offset the cost of the magazine in the coming year to make up for significantly reduced ad sales. We stepped back to assess at of our offerings, especially digital advertising, so that we could reframe some of the vendor packages to work well for them and us.

Because we are a small association, our newsletter and our website updates are handled in house. Therefore, there is not a significant added cost to making adjustments to either of those places. We decided to slightly increase the price of our digital newsletter ads and offer a print ad in our magazine for those who purchased a digital ad in the newsletter. This meant that by advertising in our digital newsletter (which was likely to get approved), they also got to increase their visibility by getting to advertise in the print magazine at “no extra cost” to them. Because the only hard cost was staff time, we were able to reallocate our budget accordingly to offset much more of the cost of our print magazine.

This solution only came about because there was a strong relationship and consistent communication between marketing and vendor management. We had developed enough rapport that the vendor management staff worked with marketing to develop all the sponsor packages from the start. We were able to talk through pros and cons, allocate staff time, and determine a workflow that worked for us, while providing a stronger offering to our vendors.

This is just one example of why marketing teams should be considered key players at the start of all sponsorship and partnership offerings.