Situation

• Major NYC Sports event needed help creating marketing platform for world famous annual sponsorship summit
• Client required help getting various sponsor stakeholders to agree on centralized messaging for marketing platform for event, which was presented at all day forum
• Sponsors wanted more opportunities to reach athletes throughout the year, so client chose to pivot from marketing the event to a year-round platform for their sport, running. The client wanted to incorporate the support network for the athletes into the event more as well
• Client requested communications skills coaching for various staff members during the engagement

Approach

• Led client team through the 5 steps of communications creation: stakeholder analysis, message structuring/strategizing, storyline development, material creation (presentations and interactive workshops), and coached all speakers for the day
• Plan for the summit was to bring the new marketing strategy to life for the sponsors, while also helping them come up with activations they could do together to embody the year-round campaign
• After analysis of sponsors and their brand goals related to the event and the sport, sponsors were grouped with sponsors with similar goals for various discussions through the day
• Workshops and talks were created to help sponsors understand their target consumers better through a panel of runners of experience levels, panel facilitated by client but sponsors also asked questions
• Client explained the new marketing strategy at beginning of forum. Client presented various mockups of possible concerts, websites, mobile apps, smaller running events, and a temporary store featuring products were created by me and shown to the sponsors to inspire their own creativity
• Sponsors were led through 2-part workshop designed by me with client team to help them articulate consumer needs and to come up with possible multi-sponsor activations around new platform. For fun, an award was given to the winning team
• In order to allow client time to network with their sponsors, I ran point as producer during the day

Impact

• Sponsorship dollars increased more than 4 times the previous amounts
• New central marketing norm for the organization, transforming organization from event marketing company to a lifestyle brand
• Communications standards for various employees improved dramatically, organizational standards raised in evaluations