Today, to develop value-added, powerful sponsorship programs—programs that offer great value to the business—managers must focus on ways to measure and evaluate their results. The movement to renew the way marketers approach sponsorship has been fueled by one of the first worldwide studies on sponsorship performance measurement carried out by the Sponsorship Marketing Council of Canada in cooperation with HEC Montréal.
The 2008 study—the first one to analyze performance measurements from an international perspective—involved eight case studies from various industries in the United States, Canada and Australia. From this study, a new performance measurement framework emerged – the Sponsorship Insight Model (SIM).
A tool that have been adopted by many brands around the globe as MasterCard, Western Union, UPS, Loto-Québec, SAQ, TELUS, covering many business sectors.
SIM: a four-dimensional dashboard
With SIM, sponsorship results need no longer be studied using one indicator. Using several indicators and examining the relationships between them provides far more meaningful insights to explain results.
The dashboard is made up of four components:
• Alignment and contribution (What are the objectives for the sponsorship?)
• Performance indicators (What are the desired results?)
• Experience parameters (How can performance be achieved?)
• The foundations (What tools are needed to perform?)
The SIM dashboard adds value at different phases of a sponsorship project:
Planning - to organize the right vehicles and activation to obtain optimal results;
Demonstrating - to create a snapshot of the entire project, to get approval;
Evaluating - to identify different points of control/leverage;
Improving - to use data and causal relations to establish the next move.
