Activation Is Everything

If you're not familiar with the term activation, it's the act and actions you and your sponsor take to make the sponsorship work for the company doing the sponsoring.
Or as the sponsorship experts, IEG, put it:

"The marketing activities a company conducts to promote its sponsorship. Money spent on activation is over and above the rights fee paid to the sponsored property. Also known of as leverage." (Source: IEG’s Guide to Sponsorship)

I don't know about you, but that still sounds a little vague to me. So let's try a "for instance."

Let's say as part of your deal you offer your sponsor the opportunity to give away two free year-long memberships to your association (or a couple of free registrations to your upcoming conference). That's great, but only as far as it goes. To take it to the next level somebody's got to let the sponsor's customers know that this benefit is available or it won't do anybody any good, right?

Getting word out about the sponsor's affiliation with you, and about this free registration opportunity, is activation. It’s how you take the words off the proposal page and put it into action. And just as IEG said in their definition above, the cost of activating the sponsorship is frequently on top of the cost the sponsor pays to buy the rights to the association from you.

But you have activation responsibilities as well. Your sponsor has to get the word out on their end, but so do you. You've promised your sponsor you're going to do certain things for them, and now you have to do it! And it’s those actions, the ones that you take in doing it is how you activate their sponsorship.

And this is critical, because how you do it, and how well you do it, often makes all the difference in whether this is a "one time thing" or if you're going to get the renewal.