Newsletter
February
2005/March 2005
by Barbara Anderson-Huget
Several people have asked me about the Sponsorship Development course I teach at Humber College. It is one of several courses I teach there. We are planning to hold Sponsorship Workshops in Ottawa and Toronto in April. Aimed at community theatres, it will be an introductory course with a hands-on element. I'll expect each participating theatre to use an upcoming play and design a sponsorship campaign around it.
As a lead-up to the workshop, I thought I'd write about some of the most common problems arts groups have in going after sponsorship money. Call this article a primer for the workshop!
These are the main points I'll be covering:
- Confusing donations and sponsorship;
- Not thinking from the view-point of the business sponsor;
- Pricing sponsorships incorrectly;
- Not following up with a report after the sponsorship is done;
- Helping the sponsor understand that they won't get a lot of value from the sponsorship in the first year.
Confusing donations and sponsorship.
They are not the same! Sponsorship is a business transaction whereby a business provides money or in-kind goods to a theatre in exchange for marketing benefits.
Please do not feel uncomfortable if you didn't know that a sponsorship was NOT a donation. Many companies who regularly sponsor ask for charitable tax receipts. But they should not get charitable receipts for their sponsorship since their sponsorship money is buying them marketing services.
Part of the confusion can be attributed to this exception: gala dinners. A company can be said to "sponsor a table": buy a table seating eight, for their employees to attend the event. The Canadian Revenue Agency will allow the charity to give the sponsor a tax receipt for the difference between the cost of the ticket and the real costs of the meal, beverage and entertainment. This exception came about two years ago after tremendous lobbying by health charities.
The sponsorship opportunity at your theatre is called the "property" and the companies or business you target to sponsor your properties are known as "prospects."
So why not just go after donations? Because sponsorship buys are usually larger amounts of money, and because it has been shown that sponsorships really pay off for the business after the first year, and so they tend to tie in with you for three to five years.
Not thinking from the view-point of the business sponsor or prospect.
Theatre groups often go into sponsorship thinking about the problems it will solve at their theatre. It may be the difference between breaking-even on a play and losing money. It may mean that the boiler can be fixed. Unfortunately, a large corporation doesn't really care about your theatre's boiler and the neighbourhood restaurant doesn't care about whether your play loses money.
Prospects care about their own businesses. As individuals, they may have an interest in your plays and theatre--and that's a huge help as you go to approach them--but sponsorship is a business decision.
Try to think like the prospect business you are going after. Let's take the neighbourhood restaurant as an example. OnTheatre (a fictitious community theatre somewhere in Ontario) is going to approach Circle R Restaurant for sponsorship. They are approaching them because last year's survey of their audience showed that 22% had dinner before attending the theatre, and only 15% indicated that it was at Circle R. OnTheatre can offer some great marketing opportunities to Circle R.
On Theatre would work out a list of benefits it could give Circle R. These benefits could include: being Production Sponsor of It's a Cat's Life that runs for ten performances in February; printing Circle R's name on every ticket; providing coupons redeemable for 15% off at Circle R for dinner on the night of the performance; or giving Circle R the opportunity to cater the opening night of It's a Cat's Life.
Incorrect pricing of sponsorships.
The most common mistake in pricing is picking a number based on what you need to get the show produced. You may need $11,000 for It's a Cat's Life but Circle R doesn't have a marketing budget of $11,000 for the whole year.
There are two methods of determining price of sponsorships. The first is "what the market will bear?" You need to have access to information from other groups in your geographic area and your "type of theatre and town" to figure out where you fit in the pecking order. If OnTheatre were located in Stratford, it could not use the sponsorship scale of the Stratford Festival as an indicator of what it would get (unless it were an "in-your-dreams" comparison.) It could also look at what it thought Circle R could afford to invest, and then price the sponsorshop accordingly.
The second method is more scientific, and it is how the sports industry and large arts organizations figure out the price. They use charts that indicate what the cost of buying each component of the full sponsorship package would be, if the sponsor were to do that. There are charts that tell you the price of just about every marketing thing you can image: cost of impressions of banners in the street; hits on websites; impressions from brochures and posters. (This is a concept that we will discuss in the workshop.)
After you've added up the value of all the tangible benefits of the marketing, you multiply that by an intangible factor: the reputation and scope of your theatre. If you are small, like OnTheatre, you might multiply by only 1.2. OnTheatre would be selling the true dollar value of the tangible benefits with just a small mark-up.
Not following up with a report after the sponsorship.
Years ago I discovered that sponsors expected post-event reports. It didn't have to be fancy, but they wanted to see the results of their sponsorship investment, such as: numbers of times their logo ran in the newspaper, number of coupons redeemed, number of dinners sold, or number of flyers taken. I had not been doing post-event reports, and I wasn't getting renewal of my sponsors.
In large and medium-sized companies, the marketing people you deal with will have to report to a superior about the success of the sponsorship. Provide them with the post-event report-it will help them tell the story in a way that looks good on you.
Sponsorship is a one- or two-year courtship before the real benefits of the relationship kick-in. Recent research shows that most sponsors reap the higher amounts of benefit (sales) each year they're involved with the property. This appears to come from the connection that people make between the product/company and the theatre over time.
If I asked you who was sponsoring the Canadian Briar (men's curling championship) this year, would you answer: Air Canada, Labatt or Nokia? You'd be wrong. Air Canada sponsors the Silver Broom, the international competition. Labatt was a multi-year sponsor of the Briar, and is still branded in our brains. Nokia sponsored for two years and then got out. This year's Briar is sponsored by Tim Hortons. I think it is a perfect fit. Tim Hortons signed for three years, with a further three-year option. Believe it or not, Tim Hortons had to out bid Pfizer's Viagara to get the sponsorship. So who said sponsorship was boring!
I hope you can join me for the workshops where I'll be happy to share other tips and stories from the wild world of Sponsorship Development!
On January 2nd, Richard Ouzounian's column in the Toronto Star listed ten theatrical things he'd like to see happen in the next twelve months. One of those things struck a major chord (that would be a musical theatre pun for sure.) There is a growing library of forgotten Canadian musicals -- why are they not being revived? Perhaps some of you might be interested in more information about those shows and maybe you'd like to hear some of those forgotten songs. You may even want to mount those shows.
Since she had recently recorded a collection of those songs, I asked that fabulous musical theatre performer Charlotte Moore to write about how and why she chose the songs she did for her solo CD. Charlotte just finished a six month run in Hairspray in Toronto. This is the first in a series of guest articles about Canadian Musical Theatre. - Vinetta Strombergs, Professional Theatre Coordinator.
Charlotte Moore, Guest Columnist
There are so many GREAT Canadian Shows. Why do they never get recorded? Why do we persist in the old-fashioned attitude that if it's from New York, it's good, but if it's from Canada, it can't be? Why is it every time I do even the most second-rate of American Musicals, there's an "Original Cast" recording? But never, EVER, had I done a Canadian one, until we did the CD for Stan Rogers-A Matter of Heart. Let me tell you, that was one of the most thrilling weeks of my life-but even that was cheating, in a way, as Stan was not a Theatre writer, and his stuff has been recorded before.
I had been wanting to do a solo CD for years, and there was never any question about what the material would be: someone has to champion the cause of all this great music, and I'm happy to be one of those people. I included songs from almost every decade since the 1950's (those two are my Dad's [Ed.: In case you didn't know, Charlotte's dad is Mavor Moore] and nobody has heard those songs in FIFTY YEARS!), and the only person who I don't know personally whose music is included is John Gray-but you simply CAN'T do a comprehensive of this genre without him. In fact, of all the shows and writers represented on the CD (it's called Friends of Mine, for obvious reasons), Anne of Green Gables is not among them -- the very fact that that show HAS been recorded made it, in my mind, ineligible. My biggest problem was what to leave OUT, and I had the real luxury of using only songs that speak to me personally.
Ultimately, we just wanted to make the best music we could-and we did NOT need to go south to find the material to do that! A lot of the shows represented have come and gone (I can hardly believe I did that Joey Miller one twenty years ago...), and some of them have yet to be produced-but really, this is just scratching the surface of what's out there. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive. I hope to be making this kind of music for a long time.
SONG LIST: FRIENDS OF MINE
1. "A Kind of Heaven" by Neil Bartram from Not Wanted on the Voyage 2002
2. "Forty-Five Minutes" by Steve Thomas and Norm Foster from Jasper Station 2001
3. "A Day With Julia" by Leslie Arden from The Last Resort 1996
4. "A Writer" by David Warrack from All Stressed Up and Nowhere To Go 1984
5. "Have You Never Been In Love Before?" by Mavor Moore from The Optimist 1956
6. "A Whisper Away" by Joey Miller from The Return of the Curse of the Mummy's Revenge 1983
7. "Nine Years" by Allen Cole from The Wrong Son 1993
8. "Just the Same!" by Mavor Moore from Sunshine Town 1952
9. "Every Single Day" by Jim Crocini and John Bertram from Revelation 1984
10. "Part of Me" by Marek Norman and Richard Ouzounian from Larry's Party 2002 / "Nothing Can Prepare You" by Leslie Arden from The House of Martin Guerre 1995
11. "You'll Never Want to Go Away" by Jim Betts from On A Summer's Night 1979
12. "Dancin' Fool" by Jim Betts from The Last Night of Starlight 1976
13. "Forever And A Day" by Patrick Rose from Songs From The Front & Rear 1982
14. "Friends Ain't Supposed to Die Til They're Old" by John Gray from Billy Bishop Goes to War 1978
15. "A Kind Of Heaven" (Reprise) by Neil Bartram from Not Wanted On The Voyage 2002
For more about Charlotte and the CD, go to her website: www.charlottemoore.ca. The CD is available at Theatrebooks, TheatreQ's, Song & Script, and Online at cdbaby.com/charlottemoore.
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