ESSENTIAL ASPECTS OF SPONSORSHIP RELATIONSHIPS

Summary: Sponsorship represents significant instrument of marketing and financial communication. It is accomplished as both side useful cooperation between sponsor and beneficiary. In that cooperation financially situated person or organization gives to participant of some project or business the most often money support. In return, receiver of that support has obligation to make it public, at communicationally visible and promotionally attractive way, that his job, or project, had been sponsored. 

As a particular form of communication between organization and its environment, sponsorship is often presented as a way of appropriate enlightened interest, which includes support to socially worth activity, in change for satisfactory specific marketing or corporative goals. One organization can have lot of benefits from sponsorship: advertising of products and services, strengthening a familiarity of organization, definement of the image, possibility of achieving the tax conveniences, contact with the particular target groups at the market, increasing a volume of sales, etc. Sponsorship can be directed towards all parts of society and it represents different possibilities, which can be limited only by imagination. The most frequent areas in which sponsorship is realised are: sport, culture and art, education, local community, radio and television.                               

Sponsorship as a way of establishing a beneficial business communication and supplying of financial means, must be very carefully and professionally planed. Creating the adequate relationship between sponsor and beneficiary demands a close attention. If one wants to establish those relationship at good grounds, it is necessary to analyse the target audience, set up clear qualitative and quantitative goals, and consider, choose and coordinate appropriate sorts of sponsorship means. It is necessary to precisely plan a program of integrated communications, so that transfer and diffusion of information could be achieved, and that effects of sponsorship can be used completely. 

A process of planning sponsorship and finding a sponsor, and of confirmation and verification of sponsorship relationship, has its professional procedure which should be known. A whole act of searching and finding potential sponsor has its particular, in time separated phases, which are functionally connected. After formulating strategy for creating sponsorship relationship, phases of implementation include: collecting information about sponsor and realizing a contact, representing a proposal (offer) for sponsorship, and signing a sponsorship contract. 

Finding and engaging sponsor occurring once is not a solution which managers of beneficiary organizations should gravitate to. Solution is in establishing a lasting business relation between beneficiary organization and sponsor, which will result in long-term useful effects for both sides.

Key words: Sponsorship, sponsor, beneficiary, sponsorship relationship, provision of financial means