What should a sponsorship report for leadership contain?

An executive committee reads a sponsorship report to make one decision: what to renew, what to renegotiate and what to stop.

Most reports do not help with that, because they are built around what happened rather than what should happen next. They open with a recap of the season, list the activations, show photographs, and leave the reader to work out the implication.

A report that supports the decision covers five things per deal.

• Full cost: rights fee plus activation, staff time and hospitality.
• Contracted against delivered, with the gaps stated rather than smoothed over.
• Results against the objectives set before signing, using the indicators agreed at that point.
• A source for each figure, marking clearly what was measured and what was estimated.
• A recommendation: renew, renegotiate or exit, with the reason.

Then one portfolio view. Leadership needs the deals side by side on cost and on delivery against objective, because the real question is rarely whether one sponsorship worked. It is whether the budget sits on the right ones.

Two things weaken these reports predictably. Mixing measured and modelled figures without saying which is which, and reporting a different set of metrics for each deal, which makes comparison impossible and reads as selective.

Keep the narrative short and put the detail behind it. Boards challenge specifics, so the underlying data should trace back to contracts and partner reporting rather than to a slide built for the occasion. The same principle governs impact reporting: figures drawn from live records are consistent and auditable, hand-compiled summaries are neither.

A sponsorship management platform builds the report from the records already held per deal, so the portfolio view assembles from source data instead of being rebuilt each cycle.