The power of Purpose is driving consumer preference and loyalty in a world where trust in corporations is low and differentiation between brands is negligible. The implications are extensive: from product innovation, R&D, and supply chain optimization, to employee engagement and marketing. Purpose, whether at the core of business operations, or at the heart of the brand proposition, is inventing, motivating and even reengineering organizations as we know them.

Why Purpose?
With 24/7 connectivity, hyper transparency and diminishing competitive barriers, companies and brands need a new narrative to break through the noise – something compelling that inspires stakeholders to engage, activate and advocate for an organization. Beyond CSR, cause marketing or altruism, ‘Purpose’ is a core strategy for profit and growth based on linking an organization’s reason for being to improving lives and impacting society.

AU Watch understands that partners decide to sponsor an event for a variety of reasons / purposes. AU Watch’s Board makes sure that all its specific cause will meet one of these needs:

• It’s good marketing for them.
• It’s good for their bottom line.
• They’re competitive with other corporations

Positioning and Marketing AU Watch
Before we talk with any potential sponsor, we ask ourselves, how are we positioning and marketing our non-profit brand? What is positioning? What is marketing?

1. Positioning: How do we compare to other non-profits? How is our focus different? We think about the position of our event. How does our event compare to other non-profit events in Africa? What do we offer that is unique and different?

We think about the position of our non-profit.

2. Marketing: How are we marketing our event? How many people do we reach out to online and offline? There are tons of online and offline ways to reach out around our event, and they don’t all have to cost a lot. Here are just a few ways we market our event offline.

• Event signage
• Street banners
• Naming opportunity for event award
• Postcards
• Invitations
• Newspaper, TV and radio ad
• Consider these online marketing channels too: banner on your website;
• mention on your blog or e-newsletter; social media advertising.

Once we figure out or agree how we are going to market our event, we get approximate numbers of:
• Ad impressions on TV, radio, newspaper, internet (TV, radio, and newspapers should have “rate sheets” for their ads that can tell you how many people potentially saw or heard your ad)

• Unique visitors to different websites. We also use Tweetreach to calculate the number of individuals who saw tweets about your event.

• Pre-events and demographics of the audience at exclusive pre-events. If a corporation is attempting to reach out to a particular segment of people, having those people at your pre-events (sessions of the African Court and African Commission, Child Committee, Recs, PAP etc or other big events around the world) will be useful in convincing businesses to sponsor.

• People seeing, hearing, talking and interacting at the event itself.

Ask Questions of Your Potential Sponsors
Corporate brand managers want sponsorships to change two main things: consumer perceptions and consumer behaviour. Our job is to show them how your sponsorship will accomplish this.

When you begin reaching out to corporations, corporate brand managers may have some assumptions about you.

You don’t have to know everything. You just need to ask the right questions such as:
1. Whom they sponsored before;
2. What their experience was with that;
3. What target audience they are trying to reach with new products or services;
4. If they could dream big, what kind of sponsorship experience would they give attendees;
5. How they will measure changes in consumer perceptions and behaviour.

These questions are important. The point to emphasize when selling an event to a sponsor is how your organization can help make the brand more valuable to people who care about social, environmental, and humanistic values.