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Top 10 U.S. Grocer Centralizes, Automates Multi-Million-Dollar Sponsorship Program with Elevent, Streamlining Sponsorship Evaluation Process while Enhancing Impact of Regional, National Sponsorship Investments
About the project
Elevent's turnkey solution empowers sponsorship teams to make data-driven decisions, slash evaluation times by more than 50%, and save millions in rights fees.
Overview
A top 10 U.S. grocery chain with more than $50 billion in annual sales, 1,000 store locations, and 200,000 employees is committed to building brand awareness and community engagement through sponsorships. Partnership marketing plays a critical role in the company’s national brand strategy and local community relationships.
Challenge
As a grocery retailer rooted in its local markets, the company faces a dual challenge: managing high-volume sponsorship requests from an array of community organizations, such as Little League teams, and local events, while also fielding high-profile opportunities from major sports properties that can reach millions of potential customers.
Operationally, these challenges manifest themselves in the following ways:
- Processing anywhere from 200-500 sponsorship requests monthly, or ~ 3000-4000 sponsorship requests annually across multiple regions
- Accounting for regional specificities and diverse objectives
- Handling requests ranging from small community sponsorships (often in-kind) to large, multi-year engagements
- Efficiently sorting through proposals based on specific regions and custom selection criteria
- Determining accurate valuations for sponsorship opportunities
Put simply, manually sorting through these proposals was a burdensome, time-consuming, and subjective task for the 30-member team, one ripe for a centralized, automated solution.
Solution
To address these challenges, the grocer selected Elevent and its flagship Brickroad™ Sponsorship Management solution, which includes an integrated financial valuation module. This cloud-based tool manages all incoming sponsorship requests via a dedicated, custom-branded portal.
Key features of the solution include:
- Quick and efficient integration
- Full client control over sponsorship selection criteria
- Powerful automation capabilities
- Automatic scoring and assignment of requests to appropriate team members
- Built-in financial valuation for promising proposals
Results
The grocer’s geographically-dispersed sponsorship team now relies on Elevent daily to select the best opportunities for building the brand and connecting with the community, saving the organization time and money, while increasing the effectiveness of the evaluation process.
The grocer is benefitting from the use of Elevent’s Brickroad Sponsorship Management solution in a number of transformative ways:
- Streamlined Workflow
- The team now handles between 200 and 500 sponsorship requests per month more efficiently
- Automation has reduced the team’s workload by 50-80%, freeing more time for value-added work
- The solution flags only the most promising proposals for prioritization and team intervention.
- Improved Decision Making
- Automatic scoring aligns proposals with company values and objectives
- Financial valuation supports data-driven negotiation with rights holders
- Ensures fair pricing for sponsorship deals
- Cost Savings
- Reduced time spent on proposal review
- Optimized rights fees through accurate valuation
- Enhanced Governance
- Provides a clear approval workflow and accountability across the organization
- Offers a digital audit trail supporting the decision-making process
- Aligns with good governance practices
Testimonials
“Elevent’s Brickroad solution has dramatically improved our sponsorship management process and the impact of our sponsorship investments. We can now quickly identify and focus on opportunities that truly align with our brand values and community engagement goals. The automated valuation feature has been a game-changer, giving us the confidence to negotiate fair deals and maximize our sponsorship ROI. This tool has not only saved us countless hours but has also enhanced our ability to make a meaningful impact in the communities we serve.”
Conclusion
By leveraging Elevent’s BrickRoad Sponsorship Management solution, this top U.S. grocer has transformed its sponsorship strategy. The company can now efficiently process a high volume of requests, make data-driven decisions, and ensure that its sponsorship investments align with both business objectives and community values.
The seamless integration of request management, automated scoring, and financial valuation enabled by Elevent has created an efficient and objective end-to-end process that not only saves time and resources but also enhances the grocer’s ability to build brand awareness and strengthen community connections across its diverse market areas.
