Cause Marketing

Yesterday I talked about the power and ease of working with other nonprofits who serve as sponsors. I mentioned that when I worked at Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals (CMNH) my four nonprofit sponsors were collectively worth more than $5 million a year to CMNH. That was more than 10 years ago and I’d be surprised if the current number for those four sponsors wasn't some multiple of $5 million. So how do you recruit valuable nonprofit sponsors? Here’s five tips: Network, network, network. The initial contact with the American Legion came through Riley Hospital for Children, the CMNH member hospital in Indianapolis. Someone knew someone at the Legion headquarters there, and my predecessor sweet-talked, cajoled and weaseled his way towards the decision-makers, many of whom had had personal experience with Riley. A ‘no’ doesn’t always mean no; sometimes it just means not now. What I mean is that persistence is vital if you want to recruit new sponsors. So, too, is good-timi...

Imagine that you’ve got at least the bones of a new cause marketing campaign in place and it’s now time to test it and see how the market will react. What do you ‘sell’ in those first few meetings with prospective sponsors? There are two schools of thought. In the first school, you never go to any meeting unprepared. That is, you put together a pretty buttoned-down sponsorship packet that outlines exactly what you’re asking of the prospective sponsor and what they get in return. In this view, what you're really selling is you and your competence at the cause marketing game. In the other school, you prepare a bare-bones document that explains what you have in mind and why they’d want to participate, along with an educated guess of how much money you’re likely to ask for. Then, once you get in front of a decision-maker you ask what they’d want in return for their sponsorship dollars. Which is best? Well, it depends in part on you and what kind of person you are. If you can’t do anyth...