5 Ways a Municipality Workshop Can Benefit Your City

In this era of belt-tightening, many cities are grappling with how to provide the same great services for residents and visitors while coping with reductions in budget. Municipalities increasingly are learning how to strategically leverage corporate sponsorship and municipal marketing initiatives to cover these gaps in budget and more. Indeed, every government municipality already has fixed assets that can be converted to generate incremental revenue streams, though they are often significantly under-utilized or simply left undeveloped. A municipal marketing workshop can shed light on the many options that cities have for raising revenue and improving services without raising taxes. As your Municipal Marketing Go-To, we’ve outlined a few benefits that your city stands to gain from a Municipal Marketing Workshop:

1. Identify Potential Sources of Untapped Revenue

What publicly-owned assets characterize your City? Community centers, arenas, convention centers? Perhaps your City enjoys public pools, gardens, parks, trails, or parking lots? Even your City’s website can become a revenue-generating asset. Our Team of seasoned professionals can help you develop an initial inventory and conduct a complete valuation of these potential revenue-generating assets

2. Understand the Process of Selling Sponsorship

You’ve facilitated a creative dialogue to begin to identify assets you can leverage to raise funds – Now what? Hosting a Municipal Marketing Workshop with experts will allow you to learn the next steps for turning publicly-owned assets into viable revenue streams, all while preserving the integrity and unique characteristics of your Municipality

3. Learn About Naming Rights

What’s in a name? Potentially millions of dollars. Naming rights is a form of advertising in which a corporation purchases the right to name a public facility (typically a high-profile sports facility or convention center). Selling naming rights is a great means of utilizing a City-owned asset to generate revenue for your municipality, and consulting the right expert is critical to getting the maximum value out of naming rights.

4. Piggyback Advertising

Does your City send out routine mailers and email blasts or instant messaging? Inclusion of a corporate-branded or sponsored message is a way of creatively leveraging corporate sponsorship to transform business as usual into additional revenue, I.E. There will be no waste pick-up on Memorial Day. This message is brought to you by Hefty Trash Bags (go for value coupons).

5. Outside the Box Thinking

Your corporate sponsorship strategy should be as unique as your City and its distinctive assets. An experienced sponsorship professional can help your municipality identify and maximize the value of even non-traditional opportunities for sponsorship. To provide an example, we worked with one City client which owned a handful of dog shelters. These shelters, which previously were chronically under-funded, were able to meet their budgets after our Team secured them a corporate sponsor (in this case, an official City dog food brand). This sponsor paid for the rights to enclose a flyer in routine shelter mailings to dog owners. Better yet, the shelters saved through routinizing wholesale amounts of dog food from the City’s dog food brand. Finally, the City’s citizens benefited through receiving complimentary coupons from the official dog food brand enclosed in the mailers. This is simply an example, but there are limitless opportunities for out-of-the-box thinking about corporate sponsorship that reap benefits for all stakeholders.

While we have delineated just a few benefits here, hosting a Municipality Workshop can shed light on the various ways that corporate sponsorship can boost revenue for your City. As twenty-five years of success in the industry would suggest, corporate sponsorship, when executed with the right expertise, can considerably increase your municipality’s budget while preserving all the great qualities that make your City unique. Please contact Facility Vendor Network Founder and President, John McDonald at (813) 597-9492, or via email at jpmgrp@gmail.com for a free initial consultation to learn more on the value that sponsorship can provide your City.