Last year, we shared the rebranding of KONNECT to Activate. Activate is a best-in-class activation platform that improves partner relationships by modernizing the way you track deals and collaborate with partners.
With Activate, you can focus on strategy by simplifying the way you manage partnerships. Activate allows you to automate how you track asset delivery, goal progress, and performance metrics, while getting more time back to focus on strategy and improve value to partners. Our activation platform also helps enrich your partnerships and drive better results with real-time metrics and insights that simplify sharing performance recaps with your partners. Additionally, Activate drives sponsorship revenue growth. It allows you to track asset performance to proactively reevaluate rate cards and maximize returns. Easily prove value to partners to drive renewals, upsells, and sponsorship revenue.
To continue providing the industry’s leading activation platform, we made significant product upgrades and added new features. Now, it’s easier than ever to manage all your partnership details – like budget, assets, objectives, and performance – in one user-friendly platform.
Objectives & Key Results (OKR) Feature Enhancements
Brands and rights holders enter partnerships to achieve measurable business objectives. Too often, those objectives are untracked while all the focus is on meeting the deal’s contractual terms. With Activate’s Objectives feature, you can capture those goals at the beginning of a partnership and use key results to measure progress throughout the season. Common partnership objectives include increases in overall sales, new product sales, and increasing brand awareness. Tracking progress provides insight into whether your partner is getting what they want out of the deal—and if they aren’t, you can proactively re-evaluate and adjust the strategy. Focusing on the real objectives leads to stronger and longer-lasting partnerships.
To improve this OKR feature, we updated the user interface and capabilities. Users can now manage OKRs on a full-page slider, rather than a pop-up, for a complete view of each OKR. For better navigation, customize and view the objective name on the side panel. You can also add more objectives and key results to each deal.
New OKR Interface
Additionally, we added the ability to customize and assign categories. Assigning categories allows you to organize Objectives and/or Key Results for the purpose of reporting. For example, categorize multiple objectives under “Brand Awareness” to easily group them together before reporting.
For more information on how to create and track OKRs in Activate, read our Help Center article.
New URL
We updated the URL to include the Activate name. The new URL is activate.koresoftware.com. The old URL will be active through end of Q2 2022 to provide enough time to fully deactivate it and transition over.
Redesigned Global Navigation
The navigation bar in Activate now shows all the available tools, making it easier to switch between functions.
Simpler Global Navigation Bar
Contact Roles (Activate or Activate + Sponsorship)
On an account’s page, users can enter essential details – like email, phone number, and title – for contacts at that organization. However, not every contact at an organization may be a primary contact. So, to specify a contact’s role within an organization, we added the contact roles feature.
The newly added feature uses tags to allow you to assign different roles to every contact within an account. Adding a contact role, such as Decision-Maker, Emergency Response, or Secondary Contact, helps you understand who to communicate with in specific scenarios.
Choose from a List of Contact Roles
We’ve also added the capability to export a report of every contact at an organization. For more information on how to configure contact roles, visit our Help Center page.
Roll Over (Copy) Rate Cards in Bulk (Activate Only)
When you add an asset to Activate, you must enter rate card information before you can use it in a deal. To sell an asset for delivery in a season, the asset must have a rate card applicable to that season. Because rates often vary over time, each rate card only applies to one season. However, it’s time consuming to manually add new rate cards for every season in each individual asset. That’s why we’ve added the rate card rollover feature in Activate.
Now, you can seamlessly copy existing rate cards to create new ones in other seasons with minor changes. For example, you may want to roll over 100 assets from 2019 to 2022. Instead of clicking into each asset and creating a new rate card for each season, simply copy the rate card to create new rate cards in all other seasons. A task that may have taken you hours or days to complete can now be done in a few minutes. By bulk copying rate cards from one season to the next, you save time and ensure accuracy of rate card details across seasons.
Copy Rate Cards in Bulk
To learn more about rolling over your rate cards, visit the Help Center page.
Visualize Sponsorship Packages (Activate + Sponsorship)In our Sponsorship product, users can bundle assets together as a package to indicate that a group of assets should be treated as one in a deal. When these packages are synced to Activate, this bundling is lost in the process. The package is not transferred, and the assets get scattered making it confusing to activate on and track them.
To fix this limitation, we’re adding the ability to visualize sponsorship packages in Activate. For example, there may be multiple social assets across different channels that belong under one asset within a deal. Packing these social posts together simplifies tracking the status of the entire asset and ensures results are reported under a single asset category. This ensures accuracy and efficiency in the way assets are tracked, synced, and reported across both our Sponsorship and Activate products. The new visualize sponsorship packages will be available late March 2022.
Package Components Listed Under Package Header
Don’t have Activate? Need a modern activation platform to manage all your partnership details in one place? Request a 30-min demo here.
KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.
