When you’re planning a B2B event, finding excellent sponsors quickly can make all the difference to how smoothly your plans and arrangements proceed. Once you’ve prepared a list of prospective sponsors, it’s your approach and how attractive your sponsorship proposal is that will determine your success.

 What to Include

 Sponsoring an event is a business proposition. Decision makers want to establish whether or not sponsoring your event will be of any benefit to their business. They want to know how many attendees the event will have, how likely they are to be interested in their product or service, and how much exposure a sponsorship will give them to those people. They’ll also consider the quality of the event and whether or not it’s one they want to be associated with.

 With that in mind, it’s important to include the following information in your sponsorship proposal:

• An overview of your event and a copy of the proposed schedule. If the event has been held successfully on previous occasions, mention this.
• Details of the business organising the event.
• The aim of the event.
• Information about the demographic of the attendees and the anticipated number of attendees.
• Details on how their sponsorship will be acknowledged for example, logo display, signage, verbal mentions, or acknowledgement on your website or in advertisements leading up to the event.
• Details of any opportunities you can offer the sponsor that may provide additional exposure to your attendees, for example, an invitation to address the attendees during the event, or to have marketing material distributed to them.

A written sponsorship proposal is essentially a sales pitch document so it’s vital to cover the one topic that your potential sponsors are most interested in – what’s in it for them. It’s not sufficient to list the tangible benefits they’ll receive in exchange for sponsorship. You want them to envision the intangible ones too. For a small business, this could include raising their industry profile.

 The key to making your proposal enticing is to ensure that your focus is firmly on the benefits to the sponsor. When prospective sponsors read your document what you want them to see is an ideal marketing opportunity – not just another sponsorship proposal.