Sports Sponsorship Insider is delighted to announce its partnership with the ESA Diploma, the first academic qualification designed specifically for the needs of the sponsorship industry.
Created and run by marketer Peter Raymond on behalf of the European Sponsorship Association, the ESA Diploma is a seven-month, web-based, distance-learning course for all stakeholders in the sponsorship industry – agencies, rights holders and brands.
According to Raymond, there are clear synergies to be gained from the relationship with Sports Sponsorship Insider: “As a leading supplier of consistently excellent, well-informed and reliable content, Sports Sponsorship Insider is a natural partner for the ESA Diploma. It’s a publication that should be read by all industry stakeholders and is recommended reading for our students.”
Sports Sponsorship Insider editor Matthew Glendinning said: “We are absolutely delighted to be an Official Partner of the ESA Diploma, which has earned the respect of the sponsorship industry since its launch in 2012. We look forward to working with ESA and contributing to the course’s development over the next 12 months.”
The 2014 ESA Diploma has five Official Partners. Along with Sports Sponsorship Insider, these are: Sport England, ICON, Activative and Sponsorium.
ESA Diploma broadens its reach
The ESA Diploma is targeting more rights-holder and brand representatives to join the intake from agencies in next year’s enrolment.
Numbers have risen from 34 students in 2012 to 50 students in 2013 and the next intake promises to be the most-subscribed yet. The Diploma will also venture further afield with a recently launched Irish version of the course running concurrently, but holding its Seminar programme in Dublin rather than London.
“The course takes a 360-degree look at the industry addressing the needs of all sponsorship stakeholders,” Raymond said.
“This is particularly important because the best partnerships – those which provide the best value for money – are activated collaboratively by brands, rights-holders and agencies working together.
“Not surprisingly, agencies want to be at the forefront of best practice. But in year two, very pleasingly, we had an increase in the numbers of rights-holders and brands, including representatives from most of the UK banks.
“The course is also designed to be relevant to a whole raft of levels of experience – as relevant to the student who is looking to launch a career as someone who has reached middle management and wants to look more deeply into the more complex areas of sponsorship.”
Best practice in sponsorship
The ESA Diploma’s success is bearing out Raymond’s long-held belief that the sponsorship industry needed a training course to match those already laid down in advertising, PR, promotional marketing and experiential.
“Sponsorship has its own rules and regulation and codes of practice but they’ve never been written down properly,” he explained. “Sponsorship is a niche discipline, but one which is increasingly important with sponsorship platforms taking the lead in a raft of brand initiatives across the whole range of marketing disciplines.”
In its first two years, the course has taken students from agencies such as Synergy, Carat, MEC Access, brandRapport, IMG and Octagon.
Speakers at the Diploma seminars have included ‘Sponsor of the Year’ winners from the Hollis Awards, British Gas and UK Swimming in year one and 02 and AEG in year two, as well as Tom Barnsley, McDonald's UK sports sponsorship manager, Synergy CEO Tim Crow, and Andy Sutherden, Hill and Knowlton’s global head of its Sports Marketing and Sponsorship practice.
As part of the course, which is divided into six modules, students also have their abilities tested by handling a real marketing brief from a selected rights-holder. In year one, students wrote a sponsorship plan for British Horseracing. In year two, in partnership with the British Olympic Association, they were asked to write a sponsorship strategy to take the Team GB model to Rio 2016 and beyond.
The course highlights the requirement for strategic and creative thinking, allied with objective analytical skills.
As for the Diploma’s future, the key is spreading the word on best practice internationally. “In the next five years we have aspirations to take the Diploma across borders,” he said. “There is a need within the sponsorship industry for markets to develop at the same pace, using the same principles. We want to work in all the major European markets, developing own language versions where necessary.”