I always get asked “How can we measure ROI” as a sponsor? This question is also applicable for properties (those selling sponsorships) to understand what a sponsor should be doing to measure ROI on your partnership with them.

The following outline provides some criteria when measuring ROI on sponsorship rights agreements and on activation of those agreements.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list, and each corporate sponsor / partner will vary in their exact needs, but this is a general blueprint that can be used in building an ROI measurement system:

Considerations

1. You need to know what you are measuring and why. Was the investment made to achieve goals or just “because”? What are the goals? Increasing revenues? Build traffic? Make the public feel good about your company? Build brand image? Until you determine WHY you are doing it you cannot determine if it is working.

2. There is a monopoly energy company in one of the provinces in Canada. It’s a crown corporation providing natural gas to the citizens of that province. They have no competition. If you want to heat your home with natural gas (as opposed to solar panels or wood burning fireplace or oil or coal which none of which will be satisfactory today) you have to buy from this company. This crown corporation spends millions in sponsorship with local community events and pro sports—their goal is about employee engagement and satisfaction (as well as public perception and other things but the main one is around employees) versus trying to sell more natural gas. It is about making employees feel proud to work for this company. Happy employees make productive employees, productive employees don’t leave, lower attrition rates mean less money in hiring and training which means more money to the bottom line – hence a measurable investment against industry attrition rates, low turnover rates, spending saved on HR costs. Because of these investments, this company has the lowest attrition rate of any oil and gas company in North America. The ROI on those sponsorship investment pays off every single year.

3. If the measurement is about “growth”, it’s important to understand— is it growth in sales, public perception, driving traffic to the website or an app or bricks and mortar store? Is it about employee engagement or retention or a GR / PR or IR play? And, depending on what the goals are… how are you measuring success?

4. Measure the right audience. Are you polling the right people? We know of a credit union that ran a massive sponsorship to target young active urban families. They invested in soccer. When they surveyed people about brand awareness, impact of the campaign, how audiences appreciated their sponsorship of soccer in the community, they polled their membership. Ugh. That membership was old coots and farmers in rural parts of the area. Ugh again. The Credit Union was trying to target a new audience of people that were not members. They should have asked those people what they thought of the campaign… not the people that are already are members and not the target audience of the campaign!

5. Failure to know what you are measuring and not having the right measurement system in place means you cannot determine if the investment was good or not!

6. There needs to be an initial base to measure against. If you don’t have a baseline to measure against (set by initial research prior to the launch of a sponsorship investment or at any given point in time during the investment) you cannot tell if there has been success. When the goal is to increase brand awareness or sales or traffic or employee retention by 10%, unless you know where you stand prior to the sponsorship or at a given baseline starting point for measurement, you cannot tell if growth has been achieved. Ensure the base is applicable to the goal and audience. If measuring sales growth— then no need to poll or survey. If measuring unaided or aided recall, then there needs to be the same audience measured for base and post!

7. A strategy and plan need to be in place. Strategy needs to include goals, objectives, measurement outcomes, measurement metrics. You need to look at both the activation strategy and the rights agreement strategy and they need to be holistic and conducive. There’s nothing worse than investing with a major objective to generate sales leads and then run an activation program designed to build brand awareness! To measure success, they all need to be on the same playing field.

8. The strategy also needs to outline timelines and ongoing research and measurement goals and metrics. You don’t need to measure ROI on all your events and investments – but rather key and random ones. You can have internal metrics and software, or systems built to measure all this in house versus out sourcing

As I said, this is not comprehensive, but hopefully will help you to better understand how to measure ROI on sponsorship investments. If you have ideas on this please feel free to share them with me.

Brent Barootes has spent almost 35 years in the sponsorship marketing industry, developing and delivering profitable sponsorship programs that result in returns on investment for nonprofits, charities and other properties and rights holder as well as sponsors. As President and CEO of the Partnership Group – Sponsorship Specialists® he leads a dedicated team of professionals delivering measurable results for their clients.