Foreword

On a recent trip to Dubai, while clearing customs, I noticed a large advertising poster informing visitors that in 1991 there was only one high-rise building in the city, while today (only a brief 20-plus years later) there are nearly 1,000, a clear testament to the speed of evolution and development happening all around us every day. Comparatively, in 1990 I coauthored, with Robert Jackson, one of the early books to come out in our field (Special Events: Inside and Out), which featured a dedicated (cutting-edge at the time) section about how to research potential sponsors—before the advent of the Internet, along with a variety of well-intentioned guidance about sponsorship sales and service. Today, you hold in your hands the evolutionary sponsorship equivalent of 1,000 new high-rise buildings in Dubai!

After decades of my own career in festival and event management, from a global perspective, I have been fascinated to note that sponsorship continues (by far) to be the leading topic of interest for conferences, conventions, webinars, et al. throughout our industry. Perhaps this is because it touches and supports everything we do or dream of doing. As we continue to learn and evolve—events and sponsors alike—there is a clear understanding that we must all keep pace in this all-important arena if we are to succeed.

In this latest update of the top-selling resource The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit, Kim Skildum-Reid and Anne-Marie Grey have continued to refine this critically important topic and lead our industry evolution in all areas of sponsorship—from planning and process to measurement and evaluation, and everything in between—providing readers with an unprecedented plethora of downloadable templates, examples, checklists, pro formas, case studies, and resource recommendations, plus direct access to the authors themselves. They have effectively taken away all of our excuses.

In a world of information overload, Skildum-Reid and Grey have simplified both process and explanation to provide the equivalent of a degree in sponsorship within the pages of a single book. Well beyond illuminating the pathway, they have provided a virtual GPS to sponsorship success for professionals at every level of experience. Follow their directions, and they will help you to evolve your own organization’s efforts to ensure that you are maximizing sponsorship returns for everyone—event/organization, sponsors, and attendees. And don’t let their “down-under” accents fool you—this is a must-have global resource for anyone currently managing or planning to implement a successful sponsorship program.

If you have ever felt the palpable energy when a new idea, vision, or tool is introduced into your own world, within your own team and organization, that allows you to see new opportunities, imagine new possibilities, or create new processes that will streamline current methods and expand returns exponentially, you already understand the difference that sharing The Sponsor Seeker’s Toolkit (4th edition) with all those in your organization can have. From there I encourage you to spread that value further along the many spokes of your professional network to help move us all forward as an industry.

Pearl Buck (1892–1973), winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for her writing, once noted, “The secret of joy in work is contained in one word—excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.” Kim Skildum-Reid and Anne-Marie Grey obviously understand where she was coming from on both fronts, and it is our good fortune that they have chosen to take us along that continuing and evolutionary path.

Steven Wood Schmader, CFEE

President & CEO
International Festivals & Events Association (IFEA World)