Major Players in Sports Business Adopt Sponsor Direct Technology to Manage Sponsorship Business
-- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Nestlé Waters North America, HSBC, TJ Maxx/Marshalls and Eli Lilly, Among the first to switch to SponsorPort® to manage sponsorship solicitations --
NEW YORK, NY, August 16, 2004 - Top Fortune 1000 companies are turning to Sponsor Direct®, the leading software development company in the sponsorship space, to help manage their sponsorship business. Major sponsors like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Nestlé Waters North America, HSBC, TJ Maxx/Marshals, and Eli Lilly will be utilizing Sponsor Direct's software solution, SponsorPort®, to manage sponsorship solicitations. SponsorPort is a Web-based application developed and built specifically for companies involved with or moving into sponsorship. Once deployed, SponsorPort allows companies and their agencies to immediately start receiving, managing and sourcing sponsorship opportunities electronically resulting in numerous internal efficiencies and reduced costs.
"The current process of receiving and responding to the endless volume of sponsorship solicitations is antiquated and outdated leading to significant internal inefficiencies and headaches and an inability to capture real potential value from these opportunities for our brand and business," said Dockery Clark, VP of Sponsorship at Bank of America. "SponsorPort makes it possible for us to easily screen proposals and to identify relevant opportunities quickly and respond."
SponsorPort enables companies and their agencies to better manage sponsorship proposals by introducing a single, organized channel for the sponsor to receive new proposals and to selectively communicate their guidelines and objectives to prospective sponsees. Once a proposal is submitted using the SponsorPort application, sponsors are guaranteed to consistently capture the information they need to properly evaluate a new sponsorship opportunity and proposals will automatically get to the decision maker immediately. Furthermore, with SponsorPort the internal collaboration, communication and archiving of relevant proposals becomes effortless.
"The fundamental premise behind the introduction of SponsorPort is to give the sponsor more control over the entire sponsorship process," said Mark Rockefeller, founder and CEO of Sponsor Direct. "SponsorPort makes it extremely easy and cost effective for a company and its agency to review and manage large volumes of unsolicited proposals and offers a powerful new low cost resource for a company to easily and effectively source new opportunities of interest."
With SponsorPort corporate sponsors no longer need to be frustrated by the time, cost and resources it takes to deal with the overwhelming number of sponsorship proposals received each month in varying, inconsistent formats via a myriad of undefined channels. "In many cases," points out Ken Brenner, President of Sponsor Direct, "99% of all unsolicited sponsorship proposals currently end up in the trash yet they still require the attention and resources of the sponsor." Manually reviewing hundreds or even thousands of proposals can be tedious and labor-intensive resulting in poorly allocated and unnecessarily wasted resources. SponsorPort gives companies a significant marketing advantage in the area of sponsorship by making it easy and cost effective for them to rapidly screen, review and respond to large volumes of proposals. By leveraging the power of the Internet, SponsorPort is making it possible for sponsors to maximize the value, minimize the cost and eliminate the frustration of the existing sponsorship proposal review process.
"As the largest water company in North America with several national and international brands including Poland Springs, Deer Park, Ice Mountain, Arrowhead, Perrier and S. Pellegrino among others, we are constantly flooded with sponsorship proposals and product donation requests. SponsorPort has created enormous internal efficiencies for our group by automating the proposal submission and screening process and has allowed us to dramatically improve the communication and sharing of sponsorship information throughout our marketing department and with our promotions agency, Ryan Partnership," said Jodi Adolfson, Marketing Manager, Presence Marketing for Nestlé Waters North America. "We are no longer concerned about receiving proposals and actually enjoy looking at new opportunities that may make sense for our business."
Sponsor Direct is also unveiling its latest Web-based solution, SponsorPort Portfolio Manager, to compliment its existing proposal management application. The portfolio management application will use similar technology to help corporate sponsors aggregate and track their current investments in sponsorship. "We believe SponsorPort and applications like it are rapidly becoming an essential tool for any organization that looks to sponsorship and event marketing as an increasingly important component of its marketing mix. It is inevitable that corporate sponsors and their agencies will continue to switch to the electronic management of proposals and sponsorship investments as well as numerous other aspects of the sponsorship process and we intend to continue to position ourselves as the leader in this space," says Rockefeller.
Founded in 2000, Sponsor Direct is a sponsorship solutions company focused on developing Web-based applications for the sponsorship industry and is rapidly becoming the leading developer of Web-based software applications to help companies embrace sponsorship. No other company combines Sponsor Direct's experience in state-of-the-art Web-based technology development with an in-depth understanding of the sponsorship process.
Sponsor Direct maintains its headquarters in Tarrytown, NY and a sales office located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.
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