How To Sell Yourself And Get Sponsors Or Media Partners For Your Event
Many believe it costs an arm and a leg to get collaborations, sponsorships, and media partners for an event mostly at zero cost.
Perhaps you run a small outfit and have a gigantic idea of creating an industry event with your industry’s movers and shakers. Then this short guide will help you win proposals and possible sponsorship for your event.
An event takes a lot of hard work and intentionality to conceive. As an individual who has managed several large events of 500+ people here are some quick do’s to help you.
Get your speakers or facilitators
Do this by ensuring you book them in advance of 5 months before the event because let’s face it; people are always busy.
This speaker list or pool should be large enough, should any of the speakers decide to cancel at the last moment due to emergence. You want to make sure you can swap speakers should they not show up.
In most cases, speakers don’t charge for facilitating events if you can communicate the value your event can bring for them. However, If they have to travel down (do ask to cover those bills except they insist on paying for themselves, especially if they are looking for exposure)
Once your speakers have been booked, it is time to design that proposal. This proposal is what you send for partnerships and sponsorship, and it should include:
- List of facilitators or speakers
2. Event venue
3. Total number of participants
4. Benefits of the conference
Having established a proposal, list out the media partners you think will benefit your industry like SME360 magazine or other business papers.
Media partners serve as a form of validation. Most media partnerships are based on exchanges. If you are dealing with a radio station, your proposition should be airtime exchanges for maybe space to exhibit at your event or a one-minute commercial featuring their products or service during your product. Some even do special discounts for attendees.
The same approach goes for TV stations and even popular internet news providers. As soon as the agreement is sealed, both parties can agree on when to start using and how long the relationship would last through the event.
Getting sponsorship for your events
No matter how small your business is, this could be beneficial. However, it is no small feat. A rare piece of advice would be to go after startups or businesses looking to scale and need leads from your industry.
This is the sweet spot where you can give them access to the contact list they can mine as theirs. You can even cross-sell by offering to have maybe their chairman or top official moderate the session at a fee, but yet again, it is important to communicate the value in terms of returns.
At other times, sponsors will reach out to you if your marketing on other platforms is performing well. If sponsors reach out, you have the upper negotiating arms and can wriggle them into a good deal. A good partnership can change how your event will and those that will be attending this event.
Other forms of partnership
Some other forms of partnership can include your printing materials and food – remember that if this is a physical event and you will need catering and prints materials such as made event brochures, flyers, cards, pen and books.
You can get in touch with print companies who can offer you partnership discounts of which some can even be done as an exchange again (value for value).
Furthermore, your catering can even be managed by a brand looking to get exposure. In the end, if you bring out your negotiation band, you may just host an event without spending a dime, but it takes skills and knowledge.
It is important to understand that many individuals are looking for business exposure, personal brand and quality leads that can turn to sales. Your job as the event manager is to ensure that you can wrap this up into one partnership and sell your event through your proposal.
