How to Evaluate Sponsorship Proposals with a Scoring System

Introduction to Evaluating Sponsorship Requests

Major brands and corporations like Coca-Cola, Nike, and F1 receive thousands of sponsorship, grant, and donation requests every month. In 2023, Coca-Cola alone was estimated to spend over $277 million on sports sponsorship deals across the Americas. It’s evident that brands of this scale have well-established systems for managing and evaluating sponsorships efficiently.

The Value of a Structured Sponsorship Evaluation Process

In today’s competitive landscape, brands, non-profits, and institutions receive an overwhelming number of sponsorship proposals. Without a structured evaluation process, it’s easy for teams to become bogged down in inefficiencies, or worse, miss out on high-value opportunities.

By creating a systematic approach to evaluating sponsorships, it can transform how your organization manages incoming proposals:

With a formalized process in place, your organization can foster consistent decision-making, strengthen its reputation, and achieve measurable results from sponsorship investments.

1. Laying the Foundation: Setting Brand Objectives and Criteria

A successful sponsorship strategy begins with a solid foundation. By defining clear goals, understanding your audience, and aligning internal teams, you can create a framework that ensures every sponsorship decision drives meaningful impact for your organization.

Clarifying Your Sponsorship Goals

Before evaluating sponsorship requests, it’s crucial to define what success looks like for your organization. Clear goals provide a roadmap for decision-making and ensure every sponsorship aligns with your broader vision. Key considerations include:

By clearly articulating these goals, you can ensure sponsorship activities complement your marketing and business objectives.

Mapping Out Your Target Audience and Market Reach

Defining your target audience is essential for maximizing sponsorship impact. Identify key demographic segments—such as age, profession, or location—and evaluate how a sponsorship can help your organization either access new markets or deepen connections with your existing customer base.

Ensuring Internal Alignment

Internal alignment is key to a unified sponsorship management approach. Engage cross-functional teams, including marketing, finance, legal, and CSR, to clarify evaluation parameters, build consensus, and establish a clear budget. By fostering internal alignment, you create a streamlined process that prioritizes transparency and supports organizational goals.

2. Building a Sponsorship Submission Process

A well-structured sponsorship submission process is the backbone of effective sponsorship management. It ensures that all requests are evaluated consistently, efficiently, and fairly. By creating a clear submission form and leveraging automation, organizations can streamline intake while gathering the necessary information to make informed decisions.

3. Defining Evaluation Criteria

Clear evaluation criteria are essential for effectively assessing sponsorship proposals. While the specifics depend on your organization's goals, here are common criteria used to evaluate proposals:

4. Creating a Sponsorship Scoring Matrix

A scoring matrix, also known as a sponsorship marketing matrix provides a structured, objective way to evaluate sponsorship proposals. By assigning weights to criteria and implementing a clear scoring methodology, you can ensure fairness, consistency, and alignment with your organization's goals.

Weighted Scoring Categories

Each evaluation criterion should be assigned a weight that reflects its importance to your organization’s objectives. Here’s a basic example of how weights might be distributed:

Weights should be tailored to your priorities. For instance, a company focused on CSR might allocate more weight to Community Impact, while a marketing-driven organization may emphasize Reach & Exposure.

Scoring Methodology

This is a basic overview of how a scoring matrix works, but it gives you a clear idea of how it can help your organization evaluate proposals based on your specific goals and requirements.

5. Sponsorship Proposal Screening and Assessment

The sponsorship evaluation process starts by screening proposals using predefined criteria to eliminate unqualified submissions. A designated committee reviews eligible proposals using a standardized scoring system designed to identify opportunities with the highest ROI.

This approach ensures resources are allocated to proposals that deliver the greatest value. Proposals selected to move forward undergo due diligence, where references, financial details, and potential risks are verified to confirm alignment with organizational standards and objectives.

6. Refining Your Sponsorship Evaluation Process

An effective sponsorship evaluation strategy requires ongoing improvement and adaptation, beginning with clear KPIs to benchmark performance. Tracking progress through data collection and detailed post-sponsorship reporting allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts. ROI analysis then builds on this foundation, offering insight into both short-term benefits, like visibility, and long-term impacts, such as brand equity. Applying these insights enables your team to adjust how future sponsorship proposals are evaluated to help maximize ROI.

Evaluating Sponsorship Proposals with Touchstone™

For organizations managing sponsorship requests at scale, a simple scoring matrix isn’t enough. Our parent company, Lumency, operates in 21 country markets, engages with over 300 Tier 1 properties globally, and has evaluated more than 3,000 sponsorship deals over the past 10 years.

Touchstone™ was created to translate our team's expertise into a tool that makes sponsorship evaluation and management more efficient for large organizations. The platform leverages AI-powered proposal scoring and other features to streamline evaluations, ensuring consistency, transparency, and alignment with your brand’s goals.

Assess Proposals Based on Your Organization’s Priorities

Touchstone™ is fully customizable to meet the unique needs of our clients. Users can leverage the platform's advanced sponsorship management features to establish an objective process for evaluating the allocation of resources and funds. All submissions are compiled into a centralized database and scored based on the criteria defined by the organization. Whether you're looking for help with sponsorship management, grant management, or donation management, Touchstone™ empowers your organization with the tools needed to succeed.

Maximizing ROI with AI-Powered Proposal Scoring

The system provides data-driven insights & prioritizes high-potential opportunities, allowing your team to maximize ROI and focus on proposals that matter most. Here's how it works:

By leveraging Touchstone™ and integrating advanced scoring capabilities, your organization can make smarter, faster, and more impactful sponsorship decisions.

Conclusion

Maximizing the impact of your sponsorship investments requires a structured, data-driven approach that aligns decisions with organizational goals. By implementing a formal evaluation system, your team can streamline processes, ensure fairness, and achieve measurable results. By utilizing sponsorship management software, organizations can simplify and enhance their ability to manage and evaluate sponsorships, grants, and donation requests at scale.