534: Should You Sponsor That?
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How do you decide what to sponsor? In this episode, we break down five key factors to consider when evaluating sponsorship opportunities, including alignment with your values, mission, and budget. We stress the importance of calculating both tangible and intangible returns, such as new clients, brand recognition, and networking opportunities. By tracking leads and setting realistic expectations for ROI, businesses can better gauge the benefits of sponsoring events or initiatives. Ultimately, we want to encourage you to balance financial goals with personal interests when making sponsorship decisions.
Main topics:
Evaluating sponsorship value alignment
Budgeting for sponsorship opportunities
Calculating sponsorship ROI metrics
Assessing potential client connections
Considering intangible sponsorship benefits
Main takeaway: Sponsorship is not just about direct financial returns but also about intangible benefits like increased brand recognition and new networking opportunities.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sponsor opportunities, tax benefits, align values, mission vision, budget evaluation, ROI calculation, social media tracking, new clients, brand recognition, community impact, potential clients, event sponsorship, intangible benefits, networking opportunities, personal interest
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:02
Hi, I'm Meghan,
Collin 00:02
I'm Collin, and
Meghan 00:03
we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional in an open, honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you so much for joining us today and listening to this episode. Thank you also to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and a big shout out to our Patreon. People who have found value in the show want to keep the podcast going. We appreciate you. If you would like to learn more about what that means, how to become a patreon person. You could go to pet sitter, confessional.com/support, as small business owners, there are a lot of ways to get our names out there. And now, at the end of the year, it's a great time to look ahead at possible sponsor opportunities in your community. You may even be getting some phone calls of businesses saying, Hey, can you sponsor us? Or can you advertise with us in 2025 and
Collin 00:44
right now is a good time to be taking advantage of these, because not only can you look ahead and plan for the coming year and see where you're going to be and how your name is going to be represented, but of course, there's obviously tax benefits too, if you were looking at this year and it was better than you expected, or maybe your your expenses were less than you anticipated. You can spend a little bit of money right now buying sponsorship opportunities in the next year, and that would obviously count towards your spent ad spend for this year. So you can look ahead and go, I need to plan for this. I need to spend a little bit of money, but you will be approached by a lot of different people. And it comes up Megan mentioned like, Okay, people may be calling you, but it could be also for things like not just money or monetary donations, but it could be donating a gift, or it could be donating time, or could be donating attention or partnering in other aspects of this. So
Meghan 01:38
we'd like to talk on this episode about how you know which are a good fit for you or good ideas to sponsor and advertise with. There are five things that you want to consider. The first one being, does it align with your values? We always talk about your mission, vision and values, but does it align with those? Is it something that you can see your company culture fitting into? Well, does the event or organization share the same principles that your company upholds, or you personally
Collin 02:04
don't discount that aspect of this as well. We all hold values to us very closely and personally to us. We can use our businesses to partner with associations to sponsor events that align with those as we try to live a life in business that are in alignment. We can use our business to sponsor those things so that we are living authentically, and our business is a reflection of who we are as a person. Let's say a local pet rescue reaches out to you and they want help sponsoring an event that's going to be training pet owners or maybe adoptees in pet for state and CPR, if you have a value of pet safety in your business. And if you personally value this kind of resource, this would be an amazing thing for you to sponsor, to make sure that you are contributing back to your community, because it is in alignment with your business.
Meghan 02:53
The second thing to consider when you're thinking about sponsoring an event is, does it align with your mission? Again, the mission vision and values. If your mission is to support pet parents. How can you do that? What are the events and the sponsorship opportunities that would align with that? A mission
Collin 03:07
of a business is obviously much bigger, a much more overarching, 30,000 foot view. What do you want to see change? Why does your business exist to in your community? If it's something to serve pet parents through every stage of life with their pet Well, you may be offered opportunities to sponsor adoption events or sponsor senior events or sponsor Special Needs pets, things like that, or maybe you're asked to put together resources for pet parents in various life stages of whether they have full time employment or whether they don't have employment, or whether they're moving or new to the area. All of those are great ways to support pet owners in the life with their pet. Some of them, yes, do cost money, and this is all of us sitting back going, what do I do when I'm asked for something? If somebody reaches out and says, I need you to sponsor this stop sign. Well, asking these questions helps us understand. It's like, well, I don't have anything personally against stop signs, but from a business perspective, that doesn't I don't see how that aligns with my values for my pets, and I don't have a mission for stop signs or things like that. That might not be the best option for you. A good
Meghan 04:20
example is we were approached by a senior living facility, and they were going to be putting in a dog park, and you got naming rights to the to the dog park if you were the top sponsor. Otherwise they had, like, benches you could sponsor, and the poop bag station and different balls and toys. After we were approached by this, we thought, Wow, this aligns great with our business and where we want to go and who we want to serve, but we did have to consider if we could afford it, because some of these opportunities can get really expensive very fast. Evaluate if the sponsorship fits into your budget at the end of the year, it's a great time to plan for 2025 to see if you have wiggle room in your budget, or if you're kind of crunched the. The end of the year. Also think about if it's a reasonable return on your investment. We think about that ROI that is kind of tricky to nail down. Sometimes we want to make sure that it's going to yield the best possible opportunities, and ultimately, a lot of clients well. And
Collin 05:13
this can be difficult to do, especially if we're being offered a sponsorship opportunity that we've never encountered before. Usually with ROIs, you can start going, Okay, well, I spent this money, and this is what I got back. But if we're thinking, do I actually need to spend that money? How do I do that before I can get any results? The first one thing you have to do is you have to set a budget. Look for sponsorship fees, whether it's money donated or value of your goods and services that you're providing, make sure that you're counting your marketing materials if you have to go to a location and you're setting up banners, brochures, branded giveaways, and then also include things like travel or accommodations, event setup costs or anything like that. If you're having to do this in person, don't discount your time that it takes to set up these things after you set your budget, look at your metrics, and there's so many that you can look at for this. There's website traffic, social media engagement, there's number of leads generated, direct sales or bookings from this. You can also look at the estimating the value of each metric based on past data or your market research. So let's say, for example, your average value of a new client, right? Your typical client spends $500 a year. Now you know, moving forward, you can anticipate every new client, on average, is going to spend $500 so if you are looking at new leads generated, you know that each new lead is $500 worth back to you, then you can look at your average value per lead. If one in five leads converts to an actual client, an actual person who's spending money with you, then every lead is actually worth 1/5 of your average client value. So if you know that, it takes you 10 leads before you actually get that client who spends $500 with you, it's each lead is only worth 1/10 of that ultimate value.
Meghan 07:00
Thinking about social media is also important, because if you typically convert a certain percentage of your followers into clients, you can extrapolate that into dollars and cents, but you won't note any of that unless you track it. So with your website set up, UTM codes in your URLs to track traffic coming from the event. QR codes are also great to track a specific engagement. When we think back to the social media again, track that growth during that time and immediately after the sponsorship period, did a lot more people like and follow your pages, then that could be a metric of your success. Also think about the inquiries and the sales that you get. Are you getting a lot more phone calls or a lot more website forms filled out? Have a system in place where you can track where these inquiries are coming from, even if it's just a simple question of, where did you hear about us? But
Collin 07:47
the power really comes in here, in nailing down what's the value of a new client, so that you can understand the value of leads, so that when you are under looking to go, why am I sponsoring this event? What is the purpose of this event? Is it supposed to further a vision, further a mission, or is it supposed to actually get me bookings? Then, when you ask the person who is putting out the sponsorship opportunity of, how many people do you expect to show up at this event, or how many people do you expect to visit this website, once they start giving you those numbers, you can start penning that down using your historical data and the average spend of each new client that you have to start putting together some metrics as to whether this would even be beneficial to you
Meghan 08:25
or not. One thing you definitely need to say yes to is pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, and that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help. For over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at petsit llc.com you can get a discount when you join by clicking membership Pet Sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance, once again, at pets@llc.com, as with everything in a business, always ask yourself, why? Why am I doing this? We are the CEOs. We get to make the big decisions. But why is it because it's just something I want my business to do? Or are my employees reaching out to me and saying, Hey, we think this would be a good idea and this would be a good culture building experience, or could it just be this is a natural fit or a new direction that we want our business to go? Because the more you know the why on the front end, the easier it's going to be to have the markers of success on the back end.
Collin 09:34
And the reason these estimated costs are so important to you is because, let's say somebody approaches you with a sponsorship opportunity for $500 well, right away, you know, okay, well, I have to get one client because my average spend per year per client is $500 so I got to get one client out of this event to make that worth my time. But don't forget, as we mentioned earlier, calculating all of the costs do you have to buy? Materials. Do you have to buy other things? Do you have to spend time setting up and tearing down? Are there associated marketing costs that they want you to take on for this? So just because you spend that $500 on that sponsorship doesn't mean that that's all you're going to need to spend. We've done this before of going, Okay, we've sponsored this event. Oh, wait, we need to have stuff on our table. Oh, wait, we actually need a table, and we need things to go on it. So all of a sudden your your your cost for that event goes up. Now the hope is, is that each event that you go to, each event that you're sponsoring and showing up to, those costs are actually brought forward and spread out over 510, 1520, events, so you can amortize it over that so each event, the cost of all of your materials is much lower, and you can get more return on investment each time that you show up to one of those. So let's say you go through all of this, you sponsor that $500 event, and you generated $1,500 worth of new clients, which means that you got probably three clients using all of our math up to this point. So we need to calculate our net profit from this. Let's say that we already had all of our materials from this, and we borrowed a few things, and we just kind of went with some paper, and we didn't go all out or buy materials, because we weren't sure how this was going to go. So we take our $1,500 of expected income from our clients, and we'd subtract that $500 so we've got $1,000 net profit. So now what we do to calculate our ROIs? We take our net profit and we divide it by our investment and then multiply by 100 I know that's a lot of math, so we're gonna take our $1,000 of net profit, divide it by our $500 sponsorship, and then we're gonna multiply that by 100 we're gonna get 200% increase on our investment. Obviously,
Meghan 11:40
that's like a best case scenario here. Yes, it is, because a lot of times it can be hard to track the clients on the back end of even if you have a giveaway at your table that says, hey, guess how many milk bones are in this bowl, and you get a free walk, or whatever the scenario is, and they have to write down their email address so that you can then send them your weekly email newsletter. But how long do you wait until you say, okay, they've actually become a client or not? Is it six months? Is it a year? Is it two years before you say, Okay, well, I guess I'm not going to get any benefit from that event that I did. That
Collin 12:12
is for everybody to decide in their own business, what is your cutoff point? Obviously, if you go hope what took me 10 years to finally pay off, or that person from 10 years ago who attended the event, who put their name in the milk bone jar, yeah, they finally using me. That's probably not a realistic time frame, but you will be able to quickly calculate, on average, how quickly can I convert somebody from an event, from a sign up, from an onboarding process, from a phone conversation, into an actual client. We have a sheet like this in our own business, where, when, anytime a new client contacts us, whether it's from our website, whether it's from our email, a phone call, or our software, we enter them into this spreadsheet. So what this gives us is an ability to track that person over time. Do they end up contacting us back in six months? Do they end up reaching back out and actually scheduling services and a meet and greet and all that stuff? Then we can look at average time from first contact to actually scheduling of services, that kind of thing. Coupled with sponsorship opportunities will give you a realistic expectation for okay, I showed up at this event, I actually got 15 people interested in my services, and they put their name in a bucket for a free walk. But I know, based off my previous historical data, because I've been calculating and tracking, that I'm not going to see a single one of those people show back up on my business for another six months, or eight months, or whatever it is that you find that you're generally converting sometimes.
Meghan 13:39
Roi is not about just direct financial gains, though. It can be intangible benefits as well, like increased brand recognition in the community, or new partnerships or new networking opportunities. Some of the greatest connections that we make when we sponsor and go to events as vendors is the other pet businesses we can say, hey, we didn't know you were a vet in town, let's partner up and do something. It can also enhance your brand credibility by associating with reputable events. If there's a massive dog parade on July 4 in your community, and everybody knows about it, and everybody goes, that would be a great thing for you to sponsor. Yeah, think
Collin 14:15
of those institutional events or other businesses that are doing things that have long histories, that are well respected, it would do us good if we could partner with them and sponsor those events as well, and be seen as in association with them. So even when these direct financial returns aren't immediately clear or they're a little cloudy, especially when we're just getting started with these, these kind of intangible benefits can have long term values to both us and our businesses.
Meghan 14:44
The fourth thing to consider when you want to sponsor an event is, will it connect with potential clients? If this event is likely to attract the type of people who would be interested in your services, say you're trying to go after people who work in manufacturing and this is right up their alley, then you definitely. Want to do this, if this aligns with everything else that we're talking about, or maybe there's a back to school event and you really want to target teachers, and somebody's asking you to sponsor all the donuts? Well, yes, that would be great. The
Collin 15:11
fifth thing to consider whether you should sponsor something or not is whether it will elevate your brand in the community or not. Anytime we put our name on something and we partner with, we sponsor something, we are seen in association with an event or another business or something going on. We have to know whether it's going to enhance our standing, enhance our visibility in our community or towards our target market, or not.
Meghan 15:34
If you have been contacted for a sponsorship opportunity, the last thing that you want to consider is, do you want to do it? Yes or No. Sometimes it can come down to passion or personal interest. It's okay to support something simply because you believe in it. It really is. It may have absolutely nothing to do with animals at all, but it's going to support your local community, and that is important to you. Just
Collin 15:56
because we can calculate an ROI doesn't mean that we always necessarily should. Sometimes it's not necessary. Sometimes it's not even the most important thing. We just feel the need to contribute to something and sponsor something because it's bettering the lives of other people, or it's making where we live just a little bit better, or anything else.
Meghan 16:15
There are almost an endless number of opportunities to sponsor things in your community. So some things that we have been approached about that were a little out of the ordinary. One time we were approached about sponsoring a race car for a kid, yeah, he's
Collin 16:28
trying to make his name known in the racing community, pretty good. And he was looking to to have sponsorships, you know, names and things on his car. This is something that was very interesting and kind of cool, and it came with different various levels of access to the pit and going to different race events and things like that. But ultimately, he traveled a long ways from where we can live in service, I mean, multiple, multiple states away at that point. It really didn't fit in with a target market or demographic. It didn't really fit in alignment with any mission, vision, values and goals that we had for a company. If we had wanted to do that, it would have just been because we thought it was kind of cool to do
Meghan 17:12
another time we thought about sponsoring Christmas trees, but we didn't have the budget for this one, unfortunately. Yeah,
Collin 17:18
this was for a fundraising opportunity for a local nonprofit. What they wanted to do is go to businesses and ask them to sponsor a Christmas tree and spend a minimum of something like two, like $1,000 or something on decorating the tree, and then the trees themselves would be auctioned off to raise money for this nonprofit. Not that the nonprofit wasn't doing amazing things or anything like that, but when we looked at this, we went, I think $1,000 could be spent a little bit better elsewhere and maybe on other opportunities. Another thing that we've been asked to sponsor, and actually, this keeps coming back across our plate, and we reassess it every time, is whether we want to sponsor these golf scorecards. So these are given out at these public golf courses in our service area, and they want to have our name up there and information about it, and they brag about how many people come and play, how many rounds of golf are played? The number of these are going to be printed, but one simple question kind of put the nail in the coffin for this for us, and continues to do this is when we asked, How far away are people driving to come to play golf here? And they have a lot of stats about this, because it's a local golf course, they know where their members are, and for most of these golf courses, their members are not local. They're driving from hours away, some of them over 80 miles away, to come play golf well.
Meghan 18:34
And the real kicker for us on this is that the people contacting us are actually a third party agency. They're not actually affiliated with the golf course, so they print these separately, and then they just give them to the golf course. Say, Hey, here's some free scorecards. Well, a lot of times the golf courses will actually just throw them in the trash and not use them at all, because they're not beholden to use them. They didn't pay anything. They didn't ask for them. They were just given them, and a lot of times they won't use them. So no thanks on that one, I don't really want to waste my money and have it be sent to a trash can.
Collin 19:05
No a trash can, not even a recycling business, right? It's all terrible all around but as you get things put on your plate, as people reach out to you, always listen to them with an open mind. I mean, from the race car to the Christmas trees to the golf scorecards, Open Minds allow us to make sure that we are assessing them in the proper light, that maybe our business has changed enough, or these become feasible to us, or maybe that are we have a new mission, or values have changed or or maybe we just have a new passion personally that we want to see pursued in and through our business. When we listen to these opportunities and don't just write them off right away. It allows us to continue to learn, to be engaged, to grow and as we say no, it actually makes our yes all that stronger, because we're way more confident in it. We're not feeling like we're just racing and chasing one thing after another.
Meghan 19:54
We would love to know what you are looking at sponsoring this coming year. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional, at. Gmail.com or you can look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional. We hope this episode has been helpful, and we appreciate you listening. We will talk with you next time bye.
