Episode 4: RevUP Partnerships

Flax: It’s not about having the magic touch. It’s about being smart, being intentional, and taking the right steps.

Shomali: Welcome to Association RevUP, the podcast that will get everyone in your association talking about revenue health. I’m your host, Carolyn Shomali. I’m the Director of Content for the Professionals for Association Revenue. And that was Lewis Flax of Flax Associates talking about partnership programs. Whether you’re an association leader or a revenue producer, this podcast series helps you explore a different aspect of your association’s revenue health in an entertaining and time-saving way.

So far this season, we’ve touched on culture, sales leadership, and sales skills. We hope you’ve been listening along with your team and have been able to honestly assess where your association’s business practices are and where you want them to go, all while using this podcast to explore some of the tools for helping you get there.

Today’s episode is one you don’t want to miss as we focus on one of the most challenging elements of association business, partnership programs. Which is odd, right? Because when done effectively, partnership programs bring in revenue that allows our associations to fund initiatives, work towards missions, and hire team members. But the reality is, in traditional association models, staff may view partnerships in a negative way.

Rosenthal: When I worked for an association, I was appointed Director of Corporate Partnerships, and I ran into one of my colleagues in the hall, and she’d been on staff for many years, and very supportive of the association and the members. And she said, Bruce, I saw the announcement about your appointment as Director of Corporate Partnerships, and I guess congratulations, but you know, you’ve gone to the dark side.

Shomali: And even the partners themselves don’t always see the correlation between their investment and positive business outcomes.

Clemmer: We have partners that literally thought that their investment with us was a donation, and not a business decision.

Shomali: But why? And how do we build partnership programs that companies want to engage with, and that association leadership, boards, and staff want to support? Those are the questions we’ll answer today, thanks to the insights of Lewis Flax, along with Tracie Clemmer of the International Downtown Association, Bruce Rosenthal of the Partnership Professionals Network, and Jeremy Figoten of the International City County Management Association.

Thanks for joining us for episode four of Association RevUP, as we learn how to rev up partnerships together.

Flax: And when we think about the different sponsorship levels, often we hear about gold, silver, bronze, platinum, wood, paper, whatever it may be, right? Not to knock those, yet what happens when we go through gold, silver, bronze, is we’re fixed in terms of what we can offer. So here, we want to move away from looking at it through this lens, because that places us in a box. And here, we’re going to look at it through a different approach.

Shomali: Lewis Flax is the founder of Flax Associates and helps association clients increase revenue by turning sponsors into partners. When considering the difference between sponsors and partners, it may be helpful to think about the meaning behind the two words themselves. In general, sponsors provide support of something or someone. Think about the sponsors of community events and fundraisers. In these cases, sponsors offer their financial support, often without an expectation of receiving anything in return.

Conversely, the word partner implies a relationship between two people or entities who are working together and collaborating toward a common goal over time. Governments partner with the private sector to improve public assets. Notable brands partner with each other to reach new audiences. Athletes enter into partnerships with leading apparel companies. One receiving a payday and the other exclusive brand placement.

All of this is relevant when discussing association sponsors versus partnership programs. One implies goodwill, while the other indicates progress toward a mutually beneficial goal. Consider this headline from ESPN: Tiger Woods, Nike, announced end of 27-year partnership. That’s a long-term, mutually beneficial lucrative relationship.

Flax: Sponsors and partners provide different kinds of value for associations. They require different kinds of relationships and a new mindset. When it comes to the approach and the mindset, the idea of before the pandemic, of sending out a prospectus and waiting for people to return a call or return an email, it was outdated five years ago, 10 years ago. It certainly outdated today. So the reality is we need a new mindset. We can’t do what we did before.

Shomali: So where do associations begin if they want to transform from one-off sponsor sales into long-term partnership programs? Flax advises his clients to utilize something he calls the step-up process. It helped Clemmer transform a $10,000 sponsor into a long-term partner with real association impact.

Clemmer: I had a very low-level $10,000 event sponsor that I really wasn’t sure what to do with except build the relationship. And working with Lewis through the step-up process really taught me how to engage with them in a way that I had a deeper understanding of their business objectives and also what their key priorities were for the next 18, 24 months so I could build a multi-year agreement with them that made sense and solved a problem. So that ended up funding new research for my organization. It added staff, which my research director was thrilled for, which also creates a lot of internal buy-in that you need to get to that next level for future partnerships.

Let’s go through each step of the step-up process. First up is S, or situation.

Flax: Where do you stand with your current sponsors? How strong are their relationships? How deep do they go within the sponsor companies? And how well do you know their goals and objectives? And most importantly, what are the challenges of your current situation that could impede the success of a partnership? We need to figure out what these challenges are ahead of time. Because if we don’t know these challenges, and we’re not aware of them, we’re going to struggle. Because the challenges aren’t going to go away. If they’re here today, they’re going to be here tomorrow, they’re going to be here next week, six months, a year, two years down the line. So what is it that we’re going to do? What action are we going to take? And we want to address this up front.

A number of people say, well, I’ll build the program on my own and then come back and get everybody to buy it. Uh-uh, that’s not going to work.

Shomali: Challenges to a partnership program could include a lack of board support or leadership buy-in. Identifying the challenge early on means you can address it.

Rosenthal: When I worked at an association, we actually pulled together the board and our top-tier year-long corporate partners to do a strategy session.

Shomali: That’s Bruce Rosenthal, who helps associations implement or improve their partnership programs. He recalls a time when he invited the board into the partnership conversation alongside the partners. After some initial resistance by the board chair, he says the shared experience and insights between the two groups sparked buy-in from the association.

Rosenthal: But 10 minutes into the discussion, she leans over to me and says, Bruce, can I borrow a few sheets of paper off your pad? And she furiously takes notes for the rest of the discussion on strategy.

Also important that the CEO and the leadership be involved and be supportive and really go from being uninformed to being the solution to the problem.

Shomali: Jeremy Figoten is the managing director of conferences and sponsorships at ICMA and says in order to build a partnership program, you have to invite other voices into the process.

Figoten: So what I found is best is one-on-ones with department heads and just ask questions. Tell it like, what do you like in the current program? What are your goals? What initiatives do you have? Just let them talk, let them complain. And what I find is when you just ask questions and listen, you get a lot of information out of it and don’t respond and just listen.

They’re like, well, you’re gonna, I can make suggestions. I said, sure. Like, oh, I didn’t realize we couldn’t do that or couldn’t make changes. So I think getting them involved in conversations, also getting it’s not Jeremy’s sponsorship program, it’s ICMA’s program. So you get to create it as well.

Shomali: Knowing your challenges and taking actions to address them allows you to focus on the next element of Flax’s step-up program, which is T, transform.

Again, it requires you to take stock of your current situation and to identify the assets you already have in place, like events, communication channels, audiences, and even your current sales team.

Flax: The sales of booths and ads is transactional. When moving from those types of transactions to a broader partnership, it’s a very different sale. Once a transactional sale, quick, there’s a deadline, there’s a timeframe, boom, boom, boom, yes or no. A partnership sale is far broader. So the question is, the person who’s responsible for that, do they have the capabilities and the skills to shift from one to the other? Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.

Clemmer: Time allocation is really important. So I can sell a sponsorship without super knowing the goal or objective and get to learn the company. But when it comes to partnerships, that is so time intensive. There’s so much research and information that goes into that to where when I submit a proposal, I know it’s a yes before I submit it.

Shomali: Figoten agrees and points out the importance of honestly assessing both the time commitment and staff resources you have to put into the program.

Figoten: My current sponsors, partners, a contract sales process is like 12 to 24 months. It’s a long time. Well, it takes a long time to build a program too, particularly one where you’re having conversations and you’re listening, that’s a lot, it’s a lot of time And you can also scale it where I just focus strictly on the top companies and just have conversations with them. Tell us how the program’s doing, ask for feedback. And just in year one of a new program, just from 13 companies, we saw an increase of about $650,000 across the organization to spend.

Shomali: Pause now and consider the current situation of your partnership program. Or if you don’t have one, assess the situation of your sponsors. What’s your biggest challenge and are there ways you can overcome it?

How can you begin to transform into a partnership program or a better one by taking stock of your current assets and your sales team resources?

Now you’ll direct your attention externally to the potential partners themselves with Flax third step, E, energize and engage.

Clemmer: And that energy is really important because it carries forward. So I started working with American Express and their Small Business Saturday campaign. They really wanted to host more local events and our stakeholders could easily do so. It was a great partnership. It’s still continuing. They’re now a major grant partner of IDA. And that led to conversations with Grow with Google. So we started working with them to really offer a new campaign that they had never done before, focused on digital tools that was successful. And so during the pandemic, they came to us with a six-figure offer to do something that they’d never done before. Piloting new things can lead to some risk, but definitely some greater reward in the end.

Flax: And when Tracie talks about with American Express or with Google and those partnerships, did that tie into webinars or conference presentations or the tools that we have?  No, it tied into her being aware of understanding what it is that they wanted, because if we’re looking at an off-the-shelf type of partnership, there’s no way that those two partnerships would have ever been developed.

So we need to make sure we’re aware of our sponsor’s needs, what their challenges are, and that’s where we need to energize.

Shomali: The last step is to develop a path ahead to implement or improve your partnership program. How are we going to put this together? How are we going to structure it? What is it that we need to do to make sure that our CEO, our leadership team, perhaps our board and our staff, what is it that needs to happen to gain their buy-in?

Shomali: When we come back, Jeremy Figoten of ICMA and Bruce Rosenthal of the partnership program Partnerships Professionals Network will help us answer that question and focus on how to obtain a team-wide approach to partnerships.

Rosenthal: I used to work for an association of 70 staff. I could find a role for every one of the 70 people who were at the point supporting the sponsor program.

Sponsor: As we focus on association partnerships, we’d like to thank our supporting partner for this podcast, VPC Inc.

VPC is an award-winning, full-service, boutique production and broadcasting company. At the Professionals for Association Revenue, we trust VPC to bring the RevUP Summit to life each year. They focus on the event audio and visual components, meaning that we can focus on developing and delivering the content that associations need to drive their ideas into business outcomes.

And the insights you are hearing during today’s episode are thanks to VPC for going the extra step to record all of our breakout sessions from last year’s RevUP Summit.

Learn more about how VPC can partner with your association by visiting their website, vpcinc.net, and be sure to mention the Professionals for Association Revenue.

Now, back to the show.

Figoten: Non-due’s revenue allows a lot of opportunities in association. It allows teams to hire people, to generate content, to work in membership, or on diversity, equity, and inclusion—whatever it’s going to be. That’s a big selling point. I think workload is important too. You’re not going to have to do everything. You can now focus on your job. That type of conversation kind of changes things a little bit.

Shomali: Our previous episodes about sales leadership and sales skills support what Figoten is saying. If we want others to get on board with what we’re doing, we have to ensure there is value and show it to them. This is a vital aspect of partnership programs, and it’s where we’ll focus the second half of our episode: creating a team-wide approach to your partnerships.

Here’s how Figoten and Rosenthal say you can do it. First up, gather data and use it to support your business decisions.

Figoten: Members want this, this, and that, and equating it to what partners can provide is essential. So, it’s not just what the staff or I am saying; it’s your members who are asking for these revenue-generating opportunities, and having board member support is also key.

When I could put that data in front of my CEO, it became an easy discussion at the board level, and for gaining resources in year two. This also gains credibility with other team members because that revenue impacts the bottom line, which can help with hiring and other areas.

Shomali: Rosenthal recommends gathering data not only from your members but also from your competitors. He recalls putting together a competitive analysis for one association, which included a list of 40 competitors. The association would have to compete with these companies for the attention of their current or potential partners. An early review of the findings caused the CEO to question its accuracy.

Rosenthal: The CEO said, “I don’t think that slide is correct.” And I said, “Sir, this is from the interviews we did with your corporate partners and other research. These are your competitors.” A couple of weeks later, we did the presentation to the senior staff, and when we got to that competitor slide, the CEO said, “Staff, look at this slide. These are our competitors. Pay attention. We need to do things differently.”

Often, doing those interviews, gathering the data, and benchmarking what other associations are doing can help build that team approach and get everyone involved.

Shomali: Next, Figoten says high-performing partnership programs are open to change and input from association staff.

Figoten:  Let them see the program, understand it, critique it, and listen. We’ve made changes before, but most importantly, it’s about listening to them. What assets do they have that you can sell? Ten times out of ten, I hear things I didn’t know about.

This isn’t a one-time back-and-forth between departments. Departments should engage in ongoing communication with each other and with the partners. They should be asking or listening to what the partners are looking for and what’s coming down the pike. If the professional development team is launching a new certification course, that’s something we’d want to know, because a lot of partners might be able to help with that. The more we know about what’s happening, whether it’s actually happening or just a thought, is always helpful.

Shomali: Here are a few final suggestions based on how Figoten and Rosenthal operate their partnership programs. First, what are you promising?

Figoten: I didn’t promise a $650,000 increase, but we ended up making a couple of hundred thousand. It’s about setting expectations.

Shomali: Next, don’t pigeonhole yourself or your potential partner with pricing options.

Figoten: One thing we do is we don’t put pricing on our website. It’s customized. So, if you only have $20,000 to spend, I can make that work, and no one else has to know that. If you have $30,000, we can make that work too. It all depends.

Shomali: Continue to show the financial impact of your top partners.

Rosenthal: I remember when I worked at an association, we had a process where each month a different department gave a presentation to staff. When it was sponsorship month, I said, “Let’s talk about sponsorship revenue and what that means to the association. You know those paychecks we got yesterday? Well, 15% of those paychecks came from those 20 companies. $1.8 million of our $18 million budget.”

Shomali: And keep at the forefront of your mind, and that of your association, what a partnership truly is: a mutually beneficial relationship in which your association and partners share resources and ideas to advance your association’s mission.

Rosenthal: I was working with an association of nursing homes and retirement communities when the healthcare reform bill became law. Members were calling and asking what to do, how to comply, and what deadlines to meet. We went to one of our corporate partners, co-branded a PowerPoint presentation, and gave a webinar featuring both the sponsor company CEO and our CEO. This provided valuable content our members wanted, which the association didn’t have the expertise to offer. That’s one of the value propositions beyond money in a corporate partnership.

Shomali: As we conclude this episode on how to RevUP partnerships, pause and consider where your association is, where you want it to go, and how today’s insights might help you get there. To recap: begin with a step-up program, situate, transform, engage, energize, and develop a path. Remember that path needs to include a team approach—engage other departments, use data to get buy-in from your board and leadership, and get creative with department budgets so revenue can be generated and used to impact the entire organization.

Finally, whether you’re selling partnerships or working in another department, remember that partnership sales rely on the work of the entire organization. The sponsorship person is like an account exec in a marketing agency. They often sell, coordinate contracts, and deliverables, but they deliver no direct services. They rely on others in the agency to design the website, work on campaigns, or provide training. Marketing agencies don’t publish prices, nor do they have gold, silver, or bronze clients. They customize and price according to client needs.

Thanks to Lewis Flax, Tracie Clemmer, Bruce Rosenthal, and Jeremy Figoten for their insights in today’s episode, and to VPC for being a supporting partner of this show.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you won’t want to miss PAR’s in-person event, the RevUP Summit, taking place November 20th and 21st in Annapolis, Maryland. Visit revupsummit.org to register, and don’t forget to use the code PARPOD for a special discount for podcast listeners—that’s P-A-R-P-O-D.

Be sure to check the show notes for details on subscribing to the PAR newsletter for ongoing insights from business development pioneers.

Come back next week as we take what we’ve learned about partnerships and move it a step further to rev up corporate connections. Associations show authority by bringing together like-minded people, and that’s one way you can get a Fortune 1000 or larger corporation’s attention.

I’m Carolyn Shomali, thanks for joining me today. Share today’s episode with your team and begin to transform your revenue and your association.