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Traditional sponsorships no longer are enough; organizations are seeking more meaningful partnerships that deliver measurable value and long-term impact. In a recent webinar, Jennifer Collins, president and CEO of JDC Events and one of Northstar's Influential #EventProfs of 2025, and Jeanne Dubosse, principal advisor of experience strategy at Boss Collective, discussed turning static sponsorships into symbiotic relationships. Watch the full webinar now, and read on for some highlights.
Shifts in sponsorships
Gone are the days where a company would pay to have their logo on a piece of signage and walk away.
"What we are seeing is a need for experiences, engagement, people coming together — that authenticity factor in terms of sponsorship," said Collins. "What we're helping our clients with is getting in front of your audience and speaking to them, seeing them, hearing from them, having experiences with them… whether it's some sort of event that you're building together, or whether they're a part of your agenda in some way."
When searching for potential partners in business — like in life — it's important to find an organization that has similar values.
"What I think works best is when you can find a marriage that evolves the conversation from a transactional relationship to a more values-based collaborative partnership," Dubosse said.
Having experience as both an event organizer and a sponsor, Dubosse has a unique vantage point. "Wearing my sponsor hat, I want to see how the event will help me solve my business problems," she added.
It's also imperative to develop an internal plan before working with external companies.
"When your strategic plan is aligned with where you're trying to go as an organization, you can then build so that you know how to use your partners and your vendors and those that are in your ecosystem," Collins said. "It's hard to continue to build all the time from scratch, but if you have those organizations that are already in your orbit, that's where you start to engage with them to see how you each can work together for both of your goals."
More sponsors, more problems?
Just as sponsors need more from events, organizers similarly need more from their partners. In order to get beyond the dollars, Dubosse encourages planners to find companies with like-minded missions.
"The conversation around money only can be very discouraging, to be honest, and the economy right now is not helping," she said. "The more you can find organic opportunities to collaborate, to add value to each other, the better it will be."
Even if the conversation is about money, needing more revenue doesn't necessarily mean needing more sponsors.
"Maybe you need a certain type of sponsor, and then you could use [fewer] sponsors at a higher value," Collins pointed out. "It's not a commodity; it's something that's very much curated and specific to your particular needs."
Having too many sponsors also can lead to burnout on your event team and, in the end, hurt both parties involved.
"You have to be able to deliver on that sponsorship at an excellent level and if we try to go for value and not quality, your team becomes overwhelmed with all the additional work that they have to do," said Dubosse. "That sponsorship experience then suffers and then we have a renewal issue."
Collaboration as capital
To counter the forces against us — i.e., the downturn in the economy, inflation, etc., — we need to work together.
"Collaboration is the new capital," Collins said. "When [people] are coming together, when they're working together, when they're understanding what we both bring to the table, what our value systems are… that's when that collaboration can do so much more for you than simply just have your name on a banner."
She cited a partnership between candy giant Mars and the University of California, Davis, where the objective was for Mars to be recognized as a leader in the field of cocoa science. Collins's team organized cocoa symposiums throughout the United States, worked with the National Academy of Sciences, and eventually brought the campaign to Ghana — the origin of a majority of the world's cocoa — for a major symposium and site visits to a cocoa farm. The symposiums were held throughout the year, and also were supported by research papers and other events.
"When you think about collaboration, it's not just a one and done," she added. "It's something that's going to continue and it's something that you have to extend the life of — that's truly how you build a community."
Additional ideas to prolong the shelf-life of a partnership include webinars, newsletters, micro-events and road shows.
"Something that I think is not used quite as much as it really should is pre-event communications," said Collins. "You can extend that for however long you want by continuously redoing and rewriting and retailoring … that's something that can be so strong that a partner can still get a lot of access and a lot of coverage through."
While sponsors could be invested in doing something different in theory, they might not be in the position to do it from a financial or resource standpoint.
"Many organizations don't have these large budgets right now, but you still want to be able to do something and that's why understanding your audience — and what they're doing, what's important to them, how they're engaging — is so important… so that you can move forward and design in such a way that makes the best impact for them," she noted.
Sponsor engagement
The founder of JDC Events emphasized the importance of using marketing and revenue-generation data as a vessel for storytelling. Doing so will not only impact legacy sponsors, but also attract newer ones.
"If you can demonstrate where and how they both fit into your particular organization, then that will give you a roadmap of how you can continue to lead with them or to maybe think of another way to incorporate them, and you can certainly bring on the new as well," Collins said. "It can be a win-win, but it's just something that you have to go a little bit deeper in understanding how to tell your story."
If partners are really interested in interacting with the audience, they could participate in the attendee team-building activities.
"The more engaging an access to the audience that you can offer the sponsor, the better it will be," said Dubosse. "This is something that I would approach very strategically and intentionally, understanding 'What is it? Why do they want to engage with this audience? What do they want to get from it?,' as well as, 'How will the audience benefit from them being part of this experience?'"
That last question is key — ensuring sponsor participation makes sense for attendees should always take precedence.
"It just depends on what your goals are and how that's fruitful for you," Collins added. "Sponsors are partners, we want to complement each other, and everybody has a role."
The future of long-term contracts
Instead of focusing on multiyear agreements for sponsors, Dubosse advised planners to concentrate on one year at a time.
"How do we go from one touch point within one year to multiple touch points within that year?" she posed.
Even with established sponsors, she will go through a sales cycle, starting with a discovery call to understand their concerns, why they want to return to the event and what they're aiming to achieve.
"I think baby steps is the reality of what we're seeing for sponsorships," she said. "The numbers of multiyear contracts went down from '23 to '25 because the uncertainty is too high. [Sponsors] have to show up and have to demonstrate the results back internally to their teams and, as the organizer, we have to demonstrate that we are able to provide the results that they expect."