Are You Ready for A Valuation?

Raising sponsorship dollars from corporate partners is… complicated. You know you have to give the company something in return for sponsorship dollars but knowing what and for how much isn’t always as straightforward as we’d like it to be.

The best way to assess what your sponsorship opportunity is worth is to conduct a simple valuation. This evidence-based exercise will quickly tell you how much your property, asset or charity should charge for the sponsorship opportunity. That being said, if you haven’t done the prep work to ready yourself for this type of analysis, the results may disappoint you.

How to Prepare for a Successful Valuation

Running an accurate valuation exercise requires a solid understanding of your audience and target demographic. It expects that you have a well-defined brand, marketing channels and a way to include companies in upcoming events. Valuation looks at these things, assesses them and provides you with an evidence-based amount to charge companies for sponsorship.

So, what happens if you run a valuation and don’t have marketing channels set up? What if you do, but you lack the strong internal systems within your organization to use them effectively? What if you have yet to conduct a demographic deep dive or lack well-defined opportunities for sponsors to actually get involved?

Running a valuation only to learn that your sponsorship isn’t worth very much can be disheartening, so park it for now, and do the prep work required to bring a better bargaining chip to the sponsorship table. Needless to say, this process will look slightly different for each organization and potential sponsorship opportunity but here are three steps you can take to get valuation-ready:

1. Messaging: Carve out a clear message around why the company should sponsor your non-profit or event. You must be able to confidently express this in 1-2 sentences.
2. Marketing channels: pick 1 or, at most, 2 social media channels and post there regularly – that’s at least every 2nd day. Start building your audience so you can share the sponsorship with them when it happens.
3. Audience: Get to know your members, donors, and event attendees. Make sure you can connect with them by email or post and then do a survey designed to learn more about them.

These steps will begin to prepare your organization for a valuation leading up to valuing your sponsorship.

If you feel like you need more help setting up the fundamentals, I can do that! Email me to set up a complimentary call and let’s talk about where to start. 

You’ve got this!

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