– It’s really, really important that you focus on collaboration. What I mean by that is with your similar events, within your town, it might be within your industry, there might be similar organisations. So what you would do is you would think about how can I partner with those events or how can I partner with those organisations so that we can actually build a stronger case and together we can go to a sponsor and we can actually present a lot more value when we collaborate. 

So from a sponsor’s perspective, it’s actually great. It means I’ve got more ripples, I’ve got more people and they’re not dealing with one-on-one, smaller relationships. So it’s really important that you think about who can I collaborate with? How can I actually build a stronger case? How can I put myself, in my organisation, in a stronger position when I’m going to a sponsor? And it might be very well if you’ve got, for example, a regional sponsor and your footprint or the geographical area that you cover is only a local area. So of course that means that you need to think further a field. 

That means that you need to look at the region and you need to say, “Well, what are the other organisations that I can work with around this region to make sure that when we go to a sponsor, we can actually give them more of a regional footprint.” And that’s why collaboration is really important because it’s going to give you an edge over somebody else, a smaller local sponsor that’s targeting the same people you’re thinking of for sponsors and partners and it’s going to give you an edge that they don’t have.