You finally secured sponsors for your event – but your work has only just begun. Now you need to deliver what you promised and prove it with hard data that shows you’re across event sponsorship trends. This will more likely lead to sponsorship renewal, as it’s a testament to your dedication to your relationship with them and the success of both parties.

The first step to measuring a sponsorship activation is to understand your sponsor’s objectives. You need to be crystal clear on what their primary goal is – whether it’s engagement, lead generation, social traffic, or actual purchases – and how they want to track effectiveness. Then you need to identify what technology you can use to track those goals. Understanding the importance of technology in event management is key to tracking event sponsorship trends.

These current and upcoming trends in event technology will help you measure the success of sponsored activations and content based on each brand’s goals.

Measure sponsorship activations with RFID

RFID (radio frequency identification) technology can help you improve your event in many ways. But event creators might not realise that RFID is a new technology for events industry tracking that can help creators gain insights and deliver detailed data on event sponsorship trends back to sponsors.

When attendees are equipped with RFID wristbands or badges, sponsors can gather important information with a quick swipe or tap. Even without changing the type of sponsorship activations you offer, RFID makes it easier and faster to collect more robust attendee data than traditional data collection techniques. For example, instead of having fans manually enter their information on an iPad, sponsors can collect that data and more with the swipe of a wristband or badge.

Using RFID doesn’t only help sponsors – it helps your event collect data as well. Without RFID provided by the event, sponsors aren’t likely to share the data they collect manually back with you and your event. But if your sponsors use RFID, you get to understand which attendees are interacting with which activations. This gives you insight into the brand affinity of your attendee-base, which you can use to attract sponsors in the future.

Measure sponsorship activations with event apps

Custom event apps provide an abundance of useful data for sponsors. Attendees might use the app to bookmark sessions they hope to attend, read about speakers and sponsors, or take part in online discussions. The more engaged your participants are with your app, the more data you can provide your sponsors about what people enjoyed.

There are several tools you can use to make a custom event app, depending on what sort of features and data are important to you. Some apps integrate beacon technology, for instance, so you can gather all data about traffic flow and which booths attendees visit.

There are a number of ways you can involve sponsors with your event app. The entire app could be sponsored by your top sponsor, or you could highlight various sponsors within the app. By sending push notifications highlighting sponsors or including sponsor offers in your app, it’s easy to see how many attendees take advantage of the discounts later. You can track every click, share, or message sent via your event app, which is all data you can report back to your sponsor.

Measure sponsorship activations with social media metrics

Social media is your ally when it comes to proving the ROI (return on investment) of sponsorship activations and identifying event sponsorship trends. Your social strategy can extend the reach of your sponsors’ message to hundreds and thousands more fans online than are at your actual event. To achieve this wider reach, you might need to re-post and share your sponsors’ messages or come up with original collaborative content. Or, if social engagement is a top concern of your sponsors, you could use activations like user-generated content (UGC) in a hashtag challenge, or tweet-to-win giveaways to drive home measurable engagement.

One of the beautiful things about social media is the concrete data it provides on event sponsorship trends. You have the ability to give your sponsors hard numbers on things like:

  • How many users interact with sponsor messaging on your social feeds
  • Which specific messages perform best
  • How many new followers were added directly after you mentioned a sponsor in a post
  • How many people commented on a post about a sponsor, and the tone of those comments
  • How many times you mentioned a sponsor in social posts.

Using a social media management tool such as Hootsuite make it easier to both run your social sponsorship campaigns and gauge their ROI. Plus, keeping up-to-date with current and upcoming trends in event technology is a great way to attract new sponsors.

Measure sponsorship activations with surveys

One of the best ways to measure the success of an event sponsorship agreement is by simply asking attendees for their opinion. With surveys, you can ask pointed questions: What brands did you see at the event? Which brands enhanced your event experience? Are you more likely to buy from those brands in the future?

There are three main types of feedback you’ll want to gather to measure sponsorship success.

  • Brand recognition: What sponsors do attendees remember seeing at your event? How many of these brands were they familiar with before the event? Which brands would they like to see at the event next year?
  • Brand engagement: During the actual event, which sponsors did attendees engage with? What brand activations did they enjoy most? Why?
  • Purchase intent: Are your guests more likely to buy something from a sponsor in the future? Would they recommend this sponsor to their friends?

Online survey tools such as SurveyMonkey make it easy to conduct surveys and tally results, which you can share with your sponsors. With Eventbrite, you can integrate your surveys with your ticketing or registration data to make it even easier. It’s essential to make your surveys short and to the point in order to get the most responses.

Surveys are a useful way to gather feedback data for sponsors and feedback from sponsors. Was their experience fulfilling and worthwhile? Do they have any requests or constructive pointers for next year? Will they come back? You can use this information to improve your sponsorship program and attract new sponsors in the future.

Winning event sponsorship

Now you know how technology can improve your data collection and analysis, you can provide detailed data to your sponsors. Enhance your knowledge on how to approach sponsors for an event with our expert advice for winning and retaining valuable event sponsors. Download our 2020 guide to event sponsorship and get the best practices needed to win sponsorships today.