Sponsor package ideas

Most sponsorship decks sell placements. Sponsors buy outcomes. The gap between those two sentences explains most of the difficulty in selling conference sponsorship, and closing it is mostly a matter of restructuring what you offer rather than discounting it.

This guide covers the assets worth selling, a four-tier structure that works at typical conference scale, and the arithmetic that should set your prices.

Start with your inventory, not with a rate card

Before writing a single tier, list what you actually have. Sponsorship inventory is finite and most of it is not the stage.

Category	Assets you probably have
Attention	Keynote intro, session intro, opening remarks, closing remarks
Space	Booth or table, registration desk area, lounge, quiet room, coffee area
Content	A session slot, a workshop, a panel seat, a report or research piece
Digital	App sponsor page, notification, event website, email footer, session listing
Physical	Lanyards, badges, signage, programme, water bottles, notebooks, wall art
Hospitality	A meal, a break, the drinks reception, a dinner, a coffee cart
Access	Attendee list opt-ins, meeting room, hosted-buyer meetings
Data	Scan-based lead capture, form responses, a post-event report

Now mark each one limited or unlimited. Limited assets are the ones you can only sell once — the lanyard, the drinks reception, the keynote intro. Those are what create real tiers. Unlimited assets — a logo on a slide, a listing in the app — are what you use to pad packages, and they carry almost no price on their own.

The mechanism of a tier is scarcity. If everything in your top tier is also available lower down in a smaller size, you do not have tiers; you have a size chart.

A four-tier structure that works

The numbers below assume a 500-person, two-day conference with a ticket price around $500. Scale them to your event; the structure holds.

Tier 1 — Headline. One only. $25,000

• Naming in the event’s own materials, in a defined and honest form.
• Opening keynote introduction, from the stage, by their person, for two minutes.
• One session slot on the main track, content approved by your programme committee.
• Premium space in the highest-traffic position.
• Sponsor page in the app at the top tier, with logo, description and link.
• One push notification during the event, wording approved by you.
• Lead capture at their space.
• Ten conference passes.
• Post-event report of their scans and their session’s attendance.

One only is doing most of the work in that list. The moment there are two headline sponsors, the price of both falls by more than half.

Tier 2 — Partner. Three maximum. $12,000

• Session slot on a secondary track, or a workshop.
• Standard space in the main flow.
• Sponsor page in the app.
• Named sponsorship of one break or one meal.
• Lead capture at their space.
• Five conference passes.
• Post-event report.

Tier 3 — Supporting. Six maximum. $5,000

• Table in the sponsor area.
• Sponsor page in the app.
• Logo in the programme and on shared signage.
• Two conference passes.
• Scan counts, without the report.

Tier 4 — Community. Unlimited. $1,500

• Sponsor page in the app.
• Logo on shared signage.
• One conference pass.

Community exists for two reasons: it lets small companies participate, and it is the tier from which next year’s Supporting sponsors are drawn. Do not staff it and do not promise it attention.

Add-ons that sell better than a tier upgrade

Sold separately, to any tier, and priced on scarcity. These often close faster than an upgrade because the buyer can point at exactly what they get.

Add-on	Indicative price at 500 attendees	Why it sells
Lanyards	$6,000	Every attendee wears it for two days. The most-seen physical asset you have.
Drinks reception	$8,000	Their name on the one thing everybody talks about the next morning
Coffee cart, both days	$5,000	Located where people already stand, for the whole event
Wi-Fi network name and splash	$4,000	Every attendee sees it, and it is genuinely useful
Charging station	$3,000	Ditto, and people linger
First-timer orientation	$2,500	Small, warm, and disproportionately memorable
Quiet room	$2,000	Buys real goodwill. Do not put branding inside it.
Notebook and pen	$2,500	Leaves the venue and stays on a desk
Session recording sponsor	$3,000	Value continues after the event
Attendee report	$3,000	A research piece with their name, distributed after

Lanyards are the single most under-priced asset at most conferences. Price them accordingly.

Pricing, from your side of the table

Ignore other conferences’ rate cards. They reflect a different audience, a different city and a different cost base. Work from your own numbers.

Step one: the gap. Total costs minus expected ticket revenue. That is what sponsorship must cover, plus your margin.

Worked example: a 500-person conference with $180,000 of costs and $500 tickets. If you expect 400 paying attendees, that is $200,000 of ticket revenue and no gap — in which case sell less sponsorship, not more. If you expect 250 paying attendees, ticket revenue is $125,000 and the gap is $55,000 plus margin.

Step two: the achievable package count. With one Headline, three Partner, six Supporting and eight Community at the prices above, the full card is $25,000 + $36,000 + $30,000 + $12,000 = $103,000. Assume you sell 60% of it in year one: roughly $62,000. That closes the gap with room.

Step three: the sponsor’s arithmetic. Divide the tier price by your attendance and by their realistic reach. A $25,000 headline at 500 attendees is $50 per attendee reached. That is a defensible number in B2B where a qualified meeting is worth several hundred dollars, and an indefensible one at a consumer event. If your per-attendee number looks high, either your audience is genuinely premium and you should say why, or your price is wrong.

Step four: the floor. Decide the number below which you will not go, before the first call. Discounting a tier once resets its price permanently, because sponsors talk to each other.

What sponsors actually renew on

Ranked by what shows up in renewal conversations:

1. Qualified conversations. Did they meet people who could buy? Everything else is a proxy for this.
2. Credibility. Did their expert get to be an expert in front of the right room?
3. Presence in a room that matters. Being visibly part of the community, which is why community sponsors renew at rates that surprise people.
4. Logo placement. Last, always, despite being the thing most decks lead with.

Sell in that order and your packages restructure themselves. The session slot moves up the list, the logo moves down, and the lead capture becomes the thing you talk about first.

The data question, answered honestly

The fastest way to damage an event is to sell your attendee list. Sponsors will ask; the answer is a structure rather than a refusal:

• What they get: the contact details of attendees who chose to give them, at a scan, at a form, or by opting in.
• What they never get: the full attendee list, or anyone’s details without that person’s knowing action.
• What you tell attendees: exactly this, in plain words, before the event.

That structure sells better than it sounds, because a list of forty people who chose to talk to a sponsor outperforms five hundred cold records, and any sponsor with a competent sales team knows it.

A limit to state plainly: event67 does not do exhibitor lead retrieval or badge scanning. Its QR feature is attendee-to-attendee networking, which is a different thing and must not be sold to a sponsor as lead capture. If your packages include scan-based lead capture, that is a separate tool and belongs in your budget as one. What event67 does give a sponsor is a tier-ordered sponsor page in the app with logo, description and link, and forms whose responses land in the organizer console.

In the app

The sponsor page in an event app is worth more than most decks claim and less than sponsors hope. Realistic framing:

• It is a destination, not a broadcast. Attendees visit it when they have a reason.
• Tier ordering is the visible signal, so make the tiers genuinely different.
• A push notification is the highest-value digital asset you have, and it is limited. One per event, wording approved by you, sold at a real price. Sponsors who are allowed to write their own will spend the permission you built.

The two mistakes worth naming

Too many sponsors. Twelve is comfortable at 500 attendees. Twenty is a trade show with a conference attached, and every sponsor’s return drops. Fewer sponsors paying more renew better and are less work.

Promising attention you cannot deliver. If the sponsor area is off the main circulation route, say so and price it accordingly. A sponsor who is disappointed by year one does not renew, and the discount you gave to close them did not buy anything.