Give the Gift(bag) That Keeps on Giving

Lots of events work hard to find creative ways to provide meaningful engagement to their sponsors. Full-page ads in the catalog, banners hung around the room during the event, even brand placement on pre-event collateral are all benefits offered to event sponsors at various levels.

Similarly, many events spend a lot of time trying to come up with a gift-bag for attendees to take home with them. Who hasn’t come back from a Bay Area event with a copy of either 7X7 Magazine, Diablo Magazine, the Wine Spectator or San Francisco Magazine shoved into a gift-bag filled with samples, coupons and (far too infrequently) chocolate? Sometimes the gift-bags are reusable; and some of those are even branded with the event.

But it was Hillcrest School in Oakland that merged sponsorship and gift bags into one aha! take-home: the reusable gift bag, branded with the event logo on one side, and the major sponsors on the other. It is one of those ideas so brilliantly simple like chocolate and peanut butter – I wish I’d come up with it first.

It gives attendees something they will actually take home and use; especially in San Francisco, where you now have to pay $0.10 per bag at the grocery store if you don’t bring your own. And it helps brand the event within the community and gives sponsors a “lasting impression” within the community. Which is one of the main points of sponsorship, right?