Business urged to sign up for valuable sponsorship workshops

The 90-minute workshops will take place in Johannesburg (May 9th), Durban (May 15th), Port Elizabeth (May 16th) and Cape Town (May 17th) and will be presented by Michael Goldman, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Pretoria's Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS).

The centrepiece of each workshop will be the soon to be released BASA Arts Sponsorship Management Toolkit. The toolkit provides South African businesses with a way of navigating through a sponsorship cycle and ultimately the ability to measure the effectiveness of an arts sponsorship as a strategic part of any business.

"We are excited about the Arts Sponsorship Management Toolkit," says Business and Arts South Africa CEO, Michelle Constant.

"We believe this will go a long way to bringing arts sponsorship into the heart of a business - a situation that can only have a positive benefit on the relationship between business and arts now and in the future."

The BASA Arts Sponsorship Management Toolkit has emerged out of research commissioned by BASA into arts sponsorship management and investment measurement mechanisms. During the Baseline Research project, BASA Members were interviewed and completed a survey, which informed aspects of the toolkit.

Funded by UNESCO and the National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund, this pivotal research has been led by Michael Goldman, and will be made available to the public as an online resource, accessible at www.basa.co.za.

The BASA Arts Sponsorship Management Toolkit guides the sponsorship process from formation of objectives, measuring impact, selecting sponsorship properties, leveraging and managing sponsorship properties and much more.

"Research has shown that the effective management of a sponsorship contributes directly to the success of the sponsorship," attests Goldman.

BASA's research into arts sponsorship management and investment measurement mechanisms has revealed several key findings that feed directly into the urgent need for a toolkit. Among these is the fact that less than 40% of art sponsors make use of internal employee-related sponsorship leveraging activities, thus missing out on significant opportunities to achieve employee-related business objectives. In addition, the Baseline Report showed the Human Resources team was only involved in art sponsorship activities in 10% of sponsors.

Findings in the measurement and monitoring terrain are also fundamental to the importance of the BASA Arts Sponsorship Management Toolkit. One of these is that 75% of art sponsors are spending less than 20% of their arts sponsorship rights budget on actually tracking the achievement of their sponsorship objectives and that in over 30% of sponsors, no measurement research is conducted.

The BASA Arts Sponsorship Management Toolkit will be available online at basa.co.za as part of Business and Arts South Africa's growing bank of digital resources. It will also be presented to the arts community via workshops in the coming months. The toolkit will allow arts organisations to favourably position themselves in terms business sponsorship objectives and management requirements as identified in the research of the toolkit.

Four initial workshops are planned to present the toolkit to business:

Johannesburg - Wednesday 9 May
Durban - Tuesday May 15
Port Elizabeth - Wednesday 16 May
Cape Town - Thursday 17 May

If you are a business representative interested in attending one of these workshops, please send enquiries to az.oc.asab@acissej. Please note that there are a limited number of places available at the workshops. The duration of each workshop is 90 minutes, starting at 08:30am.

In the event that the workshops are oversubscribed, BASA will endeavour to facilitate further sessions later in the year.

The workshops are also facilitated under the umbrella of the 15th Annual Business Day BASA Awards, supported by Anglo American, which recognise and encourage excellence and innovation in the field of business support for the arts. The deadline to submit entries for the awards is 18 May 2012. Visit www.basa.co.za for more information or call 011-447-2295.

FUNDERS

The research is funded by UNESCO and the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, and the workshops supported by BASA Members, Hollard and Artinsure.

About Business and Arts South Africa NPC:

Business and Arts South Africa NPC is an internationally recognised South African development agency which incorporates the arts into, and contributes to, corporates' commercial success. With a suite of integrated programmes, Business and Arts South Africa NPC encourages mutually beneficial partnerships between business and the arts. Business and Arts South Africa NPC was founded in 1997 as a joint initiative of government and the business sector, to secure the future development of the arts industry in South Africa, through increased corporate sector involvement. Established as a Non Profit Company, Business and Arts South Africa NPC is accountable to both government and its business members.