Once you have defined your sponsorship items and packages, it's time to start dealing with sponsors. Our goal at run.events is to enable you to navigate sponsorships year after year, event after event. Many of these sponsors will be your regular customers, and you will often be dealing with the same people for many years.

For all these reasons, you should start managing sponsors on the organizer level, from the CRM. This way, you can keep sponsors' corporate and financial data in one place, know which staff belongs to which sponsor, and reuse that information for multiple years and events.

When you open your CRM on the organizer level, you will see that you can populate partner and contact data. Let's start by prepopulating a few sponsors. We will use the "Partners" option here because sponsors are just one of the partner types.

Fill in the sponsorship data you know (addresses, phone numbers, tax registration, logo, website, etc.) and don't worry about sponsor staff for now. They will be automatically populated later as you work with the system. 

Creating a sponsorship for a sponsor

After you have created a sponsor in the CRM, let's go back to your event to create a sponsorship. A sponsorship is your deal with that sponsor for that event.

You start creating a sponsorship by clicking on the 'Add from CRM' button (as we mentioned before, those sponsors need to be entered in the CRM beforehand) and then choosing that sponsorship's initial status. Sponsorship statuses are 'Considered', 'Contacted', 'Negotiating', 'Postponed', 'Declined', 'Confirmed', and 'Cancelled'. As you can see, those statuses are defined in such a way as to help you manage the complete sponsorship lifecycle.

There are other sponsorship properties that you can enter here as well, and on top of that, you can create your own custom fields both for sponsorships and for the individual sponsorship contracts, but we will deal with that a bit later.

To manage sponsorships, please go to your event, then sponsors, and then sponsorships.