Snowboard sponsorship?

Event Sponsorship in the United States

• Hi, I am trying to obtain market data on my industry for a venture capital investor, and for our own research. Essentially we have a corporate customer base and an event customer base and i'm trying to give a sense of the size of those bases. I have sofware which allows events to post there event (ie sunnyvale art and wine festival, or bay to breakers race) into a database, then prospective corporate sponsors (like AT&T wireless) can view the event and decide if they want to sponsor the event. Essentially an online screening and filtering service for corporate marketing departments. See www.sponsorwise.com fyi. my questions are several. 1. how many events are there in the USA annually. This would include most any event from street fairs, to charitable events to sporting events. It would be nice to have a breakdown according to the size and type of event. By size i mean number of attendees, by type i mean sporting or charity or tradeshow or festival, etc. 2. how much money is spent annually on sponsorships, and a breakdown on what is spent where. 3. what is a list of the major sponsors, and what is the total number of prospective sponsors, ie the number of companies that engage in some level of sponsorship. perhaps the simple answer to this is how many companies are there with market caps from 100M to 1B (or employees of 1,000 to 10,000), and with market caps in range of 1M to 100M (or employees of 10 to 1,000). Likely those companies do some level of sponsorship and it will vary according to the size of the company. For example there are events such as the following, festivals, fairs, concerts, art, music, tradeshows, sports, etc. All of these involve sponsorship and so would be part of our market. so to summarize (i quote the vc directly): - Total # of sponsored events in US annually - Breakdown of these by size (audience & sponsorship $ per event)- perhaps $/event is an anecdotal or research average rationalized against the amount of money spent on sponsorship annually - # of sponsors in the US (would represent our total target customer base, on the corporate side) some places that have data are IEG, at www.sponsorship.com, Team Marketing Report, and Events Media Associates, has a listing of 100K events. i will need reference links to the any 3rd party data that validates answers you come up with. i will tip big for the answers. good luck. and would appreciate a quick turn around. i know this industry and the data is pretty fragmented but this will give us a good start. Thanks russell

• Answer:

  Hello Russell - Feel free to ask for any clarification you may require prior to, or if you choose to rate this answer. While finishing up this answer, an idea occurred to me on another way to find estimates on the number of sponsored events. Two simple searches on Google of: "event is sponsored by" - 77,200 links "events are sponsored by" - 6,840 links yield 84,040 links of all types that contain these phrases. Figure the second search phrase is referring to more than one event that is sponsored, and the first may have redundant references. These might cancel each other somewhat. But you know there are at least tens of thousands of documented events here. 2003 - U.S. Sponsored Spending ============================== Total spent in sponsorships: $10,250,000,000 Breakdown as follows: -- High profile professional, college, and amateur sports: $7,080,000,000 - 69.1% According to the Sports Marketplace directory published by Grey House (http://www.greyhouse.com/), there are 1,849 high profile events for 2004. The directory lists everything from parachuting to hockey, olympic events, etc. -- most of them are sponsored. Taking the 2004 projected number of sport sponsorships of $7.69B divided by 1,849 gives an extremely estimated average of about $4.2M per high profile event. -- Festivals, fairs and annual events: $769,000,000 - 7.5% The International Association of Fairs and Expositions (IAFE) http://www.fairsandexpos.com/, one of the largest organizations in the industry, says among high profile state, county and related fairs, there are about 1,355 -- majority are sponsored. An average cannot be extrapolated from the $769M, because it includes nonfair events. -- Non-profit causes: $922,000,000 - 9% http://www.ncna.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageId=412 Ephraim Feig at Kintera http://www.kintera.org/site/pp.asp?c=9qLQKYNGE&b=6442858-795-3005858-775-0824 He says there are easily a million sponsorship opportunities of $100 - $100,000+ with the 500,000 registered 501(c)3's that fill out form 990 (not counting churches). According to Jeff at Nonprofit Times( www.nptimes.com), as well as the following link, there are between 1.4 to 1.5 million *total* non-profit organizations in the US: http://www.sumptionandwyland.com/documents/term-limits.htm According to BoardSource and IRS figures, there are over 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the U.S. (over 800,000 501(c)3's alone) and over 17 million nonprofit board positions. Most of these organizations are relatively small, locally based groups with heavy participation by volunteers and limited staff support. There may be many more events sponsored through these remaining nonprofits, including churches. -- Entertainment, tours and attractions: $871,000,000 - 8.5% (Museums, zoos, aquariums, art tours) -- Performing arts: $608,000,000 - 5.9% ----- The previous expenditure data courtesy of IEG, which can be found, along with other statistics (including the top sponsors in the US) at this link: http://68.15.21.151/uploads/researchers/12_22_03_SR_issue.pdf ----------------------- According to the Center for Exhibition research, here is a breakdown of exhibition events being held in the US: Exhibition / Convention Center: 4,173 Conference Center / Seminar Facility: 798 Hotel: 4,532 Other / Not Classified: 1,591 Total: 11,094 This data is on all exhibitions occupying at least 3,000 net square feet of space and includes at least 10 exhibiting companies - including both B2B and consumer exhibitions. More than 13,000 events have been counted - three times the levels frequently reported. 99.9% have some level of sponsorship. -- According to Verizon Superpages, at http://yellowpages.superpages.com/yp.advanced.jsp?SRC=&STYPE=AD&CB=&C=&N=&A=&X=&P=&AL=&R=&PS=15&RR=10&E=&T=&S=NJ&Z=& Verifiably, there are in the US, *at least*: 55,082 elementary schools 12,629 convention centers According to these three links, there are approximately 50,000 high schools in the United States: Texas Military Institute http://www.tmi-sa.org/scat_history_cadets.html Colgate University http://www4.colgate.edu/scene/sept2003/admission.html SATBank http://www.designerclub-la.com/sat/instructor.html -- Here are a list of cities with population over 100,000: Infoplease http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108676.html Approximately 233 -- Other statistics on cities: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108476.html -- Cities and villages over 25,000: http://www.demographia.com/db-city2002.htm 1290 total cities. -- On all levels, I estimate there are millions of sponsored events occurring every year in the US. Search strategy: Started out with general search terms and called many organizations