At KORE, our software helps brands take a modern approach to their sponsorship strategy. KORE customers leverage these solutions to garner insights and streamline processes. In doing so, they become experts in activation management, customer engagement, strategic partnerships, and ROI. In plain English, it means they’re getting business done efficiently and effectively with the evidence to prove it.

KORE has spent nearly 20 years collaborating with professional sports teams, entertainment organizations, and brands. Based on this wealth of experience, we’ve identified five crucial sponsorship aspects that industry leaders capitalize on to stay ahead of the curve.

1. Leverage Data to Tell Your Stories

To be effective communicators, teams need to genuinely understand the story they’re telling. Too often, organizations are telling stories—both internally and externally—that they simply don’t know enough about. Data isn’t just useful for shaping marketing strategy; it also helps internal teams tell better stories about the work they’re doing. That ultimately leads to a more successful organization.

But data can be awfully messy—formatting and benchmarking can be widely inconsistent, and it can be extremely time consuming to find and assemble a clear story from a multitude of disparate data sets. With KORE Data Warehouse and Analytics, your organization’s insights, data, and metrics are all stored in one organized location. This allows teams to truly see how their partnerships are performing and learn what’s resonating with their audiences and partners. By consolidating your data, it’s easier to tell better stories around sponsorship results, communicate the “why” behind your investments, and advocate for budget increases.

2. Streamline Your Activation Management

Without good organization, partnership assets can easily slip through the cracks after a contract is signed. Brands may not notice gaps between what they are owed versus what has been activated on. When busy brands and rights holders are both preoccupied with multiple contracts and other partners, how would they ensure all their deliverables actually get delivered

Managing multiple sponsorship deals, timelines, and assets can be an organizational nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be—with KORE KONNECT, you can store contracts and marketing assets, track deal progress, set deadlines, and manage calendars in a single unified location. Additionally, it provides reports showing when assets were delivered, which creatives were utilized, and performance stats. By making this data easily accessible, brands and agencies gain more control over activations.

3. Utilize Measurement & Benchmarking Tools

Like any business deal, a partnership’s ROI is critical. Should you add more budget, or shift your strategy? If the data is murky, the answers will be too. It’s difficult to get useful KPIs from disparate systems with unclear insights and shallow reports. Even if you can, is it a good use of time? According to IBM, 80% of a data scientist’s time is spent cleaning and organizing data, with only 20% spent on actual analysis. That’s only one day a week of usefulness.

KORE brings a multi-step solution to this problem: automated data collection, cleansing, organizing, and consolidating into visually appealing, interactive reports. That’s our “bread and butter”—we’ve processed over 3 million sponsorship assets to date through hundreds of partnerships. And with what’s likely the richest sponsorship data set in the world, we’re uniquely positioned to benchmark your sponsorship results through consulting engagements.

4. Understand Your Hospitality Asset Returns

Hospitality assets are some of the most popular items included in partnership deals—76% of deals include them. They’re a high-impact way to create long-lasting connections between brands, partners, and consumers, plus they’re a great vessel for fostering strong relationships. In fact, they can be some of the most valuable assets to leverage for a wide variety of objectives: customer appreciation, prospecting, employee engagement, and more.

That said, most organizations don’t have a strong grasp of their hospitality assets’ ROI or determining their true value. KORE helps organizations better understand the link between hospitality and objectives, then shows ways to leverage them more strategically and ensure returns.

5. Make Smarter Investments

There’s always an abundance of investment opportunities, but rarely an abundance of funds and resources. High-performing teams frequently don’t have the time to vet or assess all the inquiries that come through, and marketing and partnership teams can get bogged down by a laundry list of sponsorship proposals they need to evaluate. It’s not an easy job, and often it comes down to a judgment call. The result? Even with the best team, valuable opportunities sometimes get missed, and sometimes investments are made in the wrong outlets.

With KORE, organizations can set up a customized data collection portal for sponsorship proposals. By collecting the right data in the same way every time, teams can more easily find the opportunities that match their criteria. The consolidated portal allows every opportunity to be vetted equally, saves teams time, and helps organizations make smarter investment decisions.