Businesses invited to attend sponsorship workshop

The 90-minute workshops will take place in Johannesburg on 9 May, Durban on 15 May, Port Elizabeth on 16 May, and Cape Town on 17 May. The workshops will be presented by Michael Goldman, senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Pretoria's Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS).

The toolkit provides South African businesses with a way of navigating through a sponsorship cycle and ultimately the ability to measure the effectiveness of an arts sponsorship as a strategic part of any business. "We are excited about the Arts Sponsorship Management Toolkit," says BASA CEO, Michelle Constant. "We believe this will go a long way to bringing arts sponsorship into the heart of a business - a situation that can only have a positive benefit on the relationship between business and arts now and in the future."

Toolkit a result of research

The toolkit has emerged out of research commissioned by BASA into arts sponsorship management and investment measurement mechanisms. During the baseline research project, BASA members were interviewed and completed a survey, which informed aspects of the toolkit.
Funded by UNESCO and the National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund, the research has been led by Goldman, and will be made available to the public as an online resource, accessible at www.basa.co.za

The toolkit guides the sponsorship process from formation of objectives, measuring impact, selecting sponsorship properties, leveraging and managing sponsorship properties and much more. "Research has shown that the effective management of a sponsorship contributes directly to the success of the sponsorship," says Goldman.

Several key findings revealed

BASA's research into arts sponsorship management and investment measurement mechanisms has revealed several key findings that feed directly into the urgent need for a toolkit. Among these is the fact that less than 40% of art sponsors make use of internal employee-related sponsorship leveraging activities, thus missing out on significant opportunities to achieve employee-related business objectives. In addition, the baseline report showed the human resources team was only involved in art sponsorship activities in 10% of sponsors.

Findings in the measurement and monitoring terrain are also fundamental to the importance of the BASA Arts Sponsorship Management Toolkit. One of these is that 75% of art sponsors are spending less than 20% of their arts sponsorship rights budget on actually tracking the achievement of their sponsorship objectives and that in over 30% of sponsors, no measurement research is conducted.