Speaker 1: Are you looking for partners and sponsors for your next event? Well, listen up. Today, we're going to walk through my strategy for attracting and signing terrific partners. Here we go. My secret weapon when throwing events is to partner up early and often. It's how I've accomplished some of the most extravagant events I've ever thrown on a shoestring budget. Partners are incredible. They help you bring in new audiences. They can often decrease line items, and they can often make your event look super legit. How do you get great partners? The way to think about it is to identify it into stages. Find the right partner. You want to pitch that partner, and then you really want to lock it in and execute and get the most value out of that partnership. We're going to walk through each three of those things right now. The first step is finding the right partner. Finding the right partner is one of the most important things you can do. Really, it's relatively simple. You are looking for somebody who shares a similar audience set to what you have. Somebody who is targeting a similar audience. If they want to reach your audience, and you want to reach theirs, there's a strong likelihood that they're going to be a good partner. The hope is that they can be a loudspeaker for you. I love partnering with media companies, so if you can find a digital publisher or a broadcaster, some sort of online presence with an audience, that's a great partner. That's a partner that you want to bring on for potentially free. They also might be able to sell advertisement and bring on a liquor sponsor or additional sponsors. I love partnering with publishers. Also, another thing you want to take a look at when you're working with a partner is do they have bandwidth? Do they have money? Do they have time? Are they willing to work with you on this? Look, I'll save you a whole bunch of time right now. If you're trying to identify a partner, and you're trying to get them to work with you, it's like pushing a boulder up a mountain, I would say move along. The path of least resistance is always the one with partnerships. If they're into it, they're going to work with you, and if they're not into it, you need to just move along and find a different partner. I'm telling you, I just saved you a lot of time. Let's say you found the right partner, and you're ready to rock, and you really want to get them on board. The next step is the pitch. What I'd recommend is thinking about the pitch in about four different steps. Step number one is a very brief email, quick, to the point, show that you're all business and you're going to host an incredible event. The best way to do so is to identify who is going to be there. Think about who that partner wants to target, and include that in the subject line, or in the first sentence of your email, who is going to be at this event. The next step is to get them on the phone. Quick 15 minute phone call is all you need. In this process, you're going to ask them a lot of the questions that you're going to need in order to create a one sheet to pitch them on. You're going to have created this one sheet template beforehand. By the way, we're going to walk through this in a second, but I can't stress this enough. Don't send them the one sheet or a deck before you get on a call with them, because they're going to answer a lot of the most important questions on that first call. Get that one sheet ready, but send it right after the call. Along with the one sheet, or as a follow up to the one sheet, you're really going to want to identify all the steps, the next steps for the event. What do they need to do to sign up? What will they need to do to make this partnership successful? Let's talk about this one sheet. By the way, if you're interested and you're going to be pitching for partnerships soon, I included some of my best templates as a downloadable in the article with this video, so feel free to go download that and use my one sheet template. This is the general outline of what I think make the best one sheets. The point of a one sheet is to communicate visually how legit and real your event is. What you're going to want to do is really bring this event to life. Give it a title. Make it feel like an event. Don't forget, an event has a date, it has a time. That's what an event has. It kind of has specifics and details and logistics already baked in, so even if those are TBD, don't make them TBD. Give at least work in progress text. Then what you want to do is you want to outline the when and the where of the event. If it's a cool venue, take pictures of the venue, throw that right on the one sheet. Again, you want to make this feel very real. The next piece might be the most important, who. Who is going to be at this event? You want to brag here. You're going to have celebrities, VIPs, influencers, press, clients, prospects. You might even go as far as to list all the different titles of the people who will be attending or maybe even attendees from previous events is a great place to put here. You really want to brag about your audience or at least your target audience. The fourth one is wow. You want to get people excited about this event. Don't forget, they need to fall in love with this event in order to partner with you on it. Lastly, outline the benefits that they're going to get. Are they going to get access to the list after the event, VIP tickets, are they going to get inclusion in pre and post event promotion, are they going to get logos on the website? What are they going to get by partnering with you on this event? You want to list out all of those things on a one sheet, not a deck. A one sheet is one sheet. If you can put this in a one sheet and put it in somebody's inbox, even copy and paste it into the email, you're going to find that you're going to have a much higher hit rate. Again, you're going to send that one sheet after the first phone call. Let's say that you got this partner excited and they're ready to go. This is the important next step. To lock them in, there's only one way to lock in any partnership and it's with a contract. You need to get that signature. By the way, we also have great templates of our partnership contracts in the article below too. Take a look at those. You don't need to reinvent the wheel there. There's some great templates. The next step to locking it in is to treat every partner like a sponsor, like a paying sponsor. These people, whether or not they're adding value or they're giving you money, you need to treat them as if they have really paid to be part of this event. That means a consistent follow-up email. That means being attentive to their needs. That means sending them a really beautiful recap report after the event. I find that if I treat my partners like sponsors and I put that in my brain and in the brains of the people on my team, I get a lot more out of that partnership. They end up coming to the table and really delivering the value that I originally expected. Last but not least, own it. Own the entire process. Look, I have found that the best way to really get the most out of a partnership is to put one person on your team on that partner. Make sure that reminder email goes out. Make sure they bring their brand VIPs. Make sure that they have strong collateral at the event and that their booth is set up on time. It's that type of stuff, giving them a very clear and thoughtful Gantt chart, leading them through that process, that really squeezes all the juice out of a potential partnership. That's how I think about executing a strong partnership strategy for my events. I try to find partnerships that share our audience. I try to pitch them with a one sheet, and then I try to lock them in with a contract and a thoughtful plan for next steps. Look, as I said, this has been my secret weapon. It's been how I've been able to grow my entire attendee list. It's how I've been able to make my events seem a lot more legit than they actually are, and I hope that it works for you, too. Check it out, and make sure to check out those downloadables. We've got the contract on the website, and we have the one sheet on the website, and I hope you find those useful for your efforts. Okay, thanks for checking out this week's Run-Up Show, and I'll see you next week. Craving more event content? If so, subscribe below, and you can check out more episodes of Run-Up Show Weekly.