Losing an annual sponsor can spell disaster for events at any scale—well, other than the Super Bowl perhaps—but having a recovery strategy in place is key to recovering.
To weigh in on best practices in the wake of losing a sponsor, Vendelux sat down with event industry veteran David Ogiste, who in 2020 took his culmination of experiential knowledge from working with brands and agencies and launched Nobody’s Café, a global creative brand experience agency based out of London.
Here’s the three things Ogiste advises to do next (and no, it doesn’t include panicking)…
1. Explore why you’ve lost that sponsor.
Don’t be shy to come right out and ask a sponsor why they didn’t renew their agreement, Ogiste advised. If it has something to do with the service they received or the way the sponsorship was being activated, there could even be an opportunity to win that sponsor back. This is particularly true of lower-tier partners who you’re likely not speaking to as, say, a headline sponsor, which would more likely to bring up concerns throughout the creative process.
It also comes down to timing, Ogiste added. As long as issues are handled at the right time, it’s possible that any sponsorship can be rectified.
But keep in mind: There’s “a bit of luck” that comes into play when a sponsor returns time and time again to an event, Ogiste said; therefore, there are scenarios that are out of your control when a sponsor doesn’t re-up an agreement. For example, “a new CMO comes on board and doesn’t like the event that you run, [or] they have different plans from the old CMO […] or the company just doesn’t have the budget anymore,” Ogiste offered. “Usually what you will find when there’s a change internally at a company, [is that execs] make the decision that they just want to change everything because they want to put their own stamp on things.”
And though there’s not much you can do in a case like that, it’s still important to understand what triggered a sponsor to go in a different direction as the feedback has the potential to affect your event strategy moving forward.
“Not reaching out—I think—is probably a bigger negative than reaching out,” Ogiste said, emphasizing that though sponsorships fall under “B2B, as with everything, B2B still means person to person, and that’s the reality of it,” he added, highlighting the importance of building relationships with sponsors.
Thus, don’t rush and send out a survey, which tends to create more work for people, especially when open-ended questions are involved, Ogiste advised.
If a brand has up to 50 sponsors and is looking to aggregate data-driven feedback, such as scores, percentages and other ROI-related metrics, perhaps a survey could be a helpful tool to share with sponsors and partners. But if you’re trying to find out why a sponsor no longer wants to be involved in your event, you need an anecdotal conversation, according to Ogiste.
And if a sponsor responds poorly to questions about their decisions to pull out of an event,
“at least you know there’s no salvaging that relationship,” Ogiste said.
2. Reevaluate your position in the market.
If you’re losing sponsors on an event that’s been running for a decade,
“the issue could be that it’s not hitting in the market the way it used to,” Ogiste said. “You see that a lot with sponsorships over longer terms, where they say, ‘We’re done with that event, we did it for 10 years, but now our audience has moved here or there.’”
But if a sponsor pulls its participation in a years-long annual event and there’s not another sponsor queued up right behind it, “there’s something wrong with the event in the market in a big way. So, that goes back to the original question of figuring out why,” Ogiste added.
Especially nowadays, it’s easy to cherry-pick which events haven’t innovated alongside the market because sponsorships themselves have changed drastically in recent years.
No longer do sponsors just want to be logos. Rather, “they want to actually show up physically,” Ogiste said, nodding to Tiffany & Co.’s partnership with the US Open, which includes designing the tennis tournament’s trophies but also hosting a pop-up on-site at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. He also noted that his company, Nobody’s Café, gets business solely off of activating sponsorships, like it did recently with Trivago’s partnership with Chelsea Football Club—when it hosted a one-day tournament for Trivago customers to meet famed UK-based soccer players.
3. Consider ways you can sweeten up your sponsorship deals.
It’s common for event organizers to think that they have to change what they’re charging sponsors when they lose a sponsor. But don’t be so quick to do that, Ogiste warned, because changing pricing for one sponsor “opens up other concerns” about whether other sponsors are getting a fair shake.
Rather, consider white-glove service as an added bonus to a sponsorship deal, because that’s an area organizations can likely act on quickly—and giving sponsors back some time is never something they’re going to shy away from.
One example Ogiste offered: If sponsors have to turn assets around quickly, consider acting as a sort of dedicated account manager that, for instance, helps the design process along. This is also an opportunity to make sure that once on-site, every sponsor doesn’t show up in such a unique way that it makes for a disjointed-looking event—which can happen when
“20 different sponsors turning up to your event with 20 different logo styles and 20 ways of doing their designs,” Ogiste cautioned.
A final tip from Ogiste: Think of a multi-sponsorship event as a magazine. “When you open a magazine—think Vogue—you can flick through all the pages and the Gucci advert and the Hermes advert may look really different, but they still feel really cohesive. I think a lot of event organizers that bring on sponsors [or are worried about why they lost sponsors] forget about that.” How to deal with it? Give your sponsors a brief, Ogiste said, and “have them work within a theme.”
