Should we measure sponsorship ROI or return on objectives?

This question usually comes up when finance asks for an ROI figure and the sponsorship team knows the deal was never bought for a financial return.

The two measures answer different questions. Return on investment compares the value produced against what the sponsorship cost. Return on objectives compares what was delivered against what the deal was signed to achieve, whether that was awareness in a new market, employee engagement or community outcomes.

Most enterprise portfolios need both, and for the same reason: neither is credible on its own.

An ROI figure with no stated objective invites the question "return on what?". A set of objectives with no cost attached cannot tell you whether the same money would have worked harder elsewhere.

In practice, we see teams run into three problems:

• The objective was never written down, so the only measure left is exposure.
• Exposure gets converted into a currency figure through media value equivalency and presented as ROI, which does not survive scrutiny.
• Each sponsorship is judged on a different basis, so the portfolio cannot be compared.

The workable approach is to state the objective per deal, in the terms that deal was bought in, then record the full cost against it, fee plus activation. That gives a return on objectives view per sponsorship and a cost per outcome view across the portfolio.

It also settles the argument at renewal, because the standard was agreed before the money was spent rather than chosen afterwards by whoever is defending the deal.

A sponsorship management platform holds the objective, the cost and the results on one record, so both views come from the same data. Our guide to measuring sponsorship ROI sets out the metric families in more detail.