Super Simple Fulfillment Report Template

The big day of the event has come and gone, and it was a rousing success. Your sponsor lived up to their end of the deal, and you lived up to yours.

Now it’s time to prove it with a sponsorship fulfillment report.

Some first-time and second-time sponsorship seekers get so excited or overwhelmed with the process of obtaining sponsorship that they don’t realize until way late that they have no idea how to produce a fulfillment report.

Since a fulfillment report is a major part of sponsor retention, I want to show you how it’s done in today’s post. I promise you that it’s easier than you think. 

Ahead, I’ll share with you all the gems from my free Sponsorship Collective Facebook training, including a fulfillment report template, so you can begin producing enriching, informative sponsorship wrap-up reports.

Let’s get into it.

What Is a Sponsorship Fulfillment Report? A Quick Refresher

Before I get into my template, I want to be clear that you know what I mean when I talk about a sponsorship fulfillment report.

Also known as a wrap-up report or post-event report, a fulfillment report is a document you produce after your event or opportunity that outlines the entirety of your deal with the sponsor. 

You go over every asset, benefit, and activation that you said you would provide. Then you itemize each one and note–truthfully, mind you–whether you fulfilled the objective or achieved the goal you said you would.

You should also note your rate of achievement. For example, if you promised to increase the sponsor’s web traffic by 30 percent but it went up by 40 percent, that should be in your report.

Outside of just numbers and paragraphs of information, a good sponsorship fulfillment report should also include photos of your event or sponsorship opportunity. 

If you had a sponsored booth, speaking opportunity, product placement opportunity, program ad, signage, or website, you want photos of everything.

Producing a sponsorship fulfillment report gives you a chance to meet with the sponsor one more time to discuss the contents of the report. This is how you can set the stage for negotiating a future deal (but only if you’re interested in doing that).

I must stress one point – when producing a sponsorship fulfillment report, don’t lie. You can’t get away with fudging numbers or cooking the books anyway because the sponsor has access to much of the same metrics you do.

You can’t claim to have increased their website traffic by 60 percent when the sponsor sees their web traffic only went up 28 percent. 

You also can’t tell the sponsor that you increased their leads by 7,000 people when only 2,000 new leads entered the sponsor’s sales funnel. They can see how many leads they have. 

Lying is a great way to sour the relationship you had with a sponsor and ensure you two never work together again! 

My Simple Sponsorship Fulfillment Report Template

Okay, so now you know what goes into a sponsorship fulfillment report, but how do you start writing one? 

I’m so glad you asked! You use this handy, dandy wrap-up report template. Here’s what you should include in your sponsorship fulfillment report per the template.

Title Page

As was true when writing your sponsorship proposal, your fulfillment report begins with a title page. 

You can use the same title page as in the proposal, as you need your company name, the name of your opportunity, the location of the event or opportunity, and the dates the event or opportunity occurred.

You also need a logo and your website. 

Page Two – An Overview of Your Opportunity

Yes, this page will feel oddly reminiscent of your sponsorship proposal as well. Again, you could lift this page from the proposal, but be ready to add more information.

The point of this page in the sponsorship fulfillment report is to recap the event.

In the first paragraph, you can repeat the mission statement for your cause. 

Next, in the second paragraph, discuss your event, program, or opportunity.

Include testimonials from noteworthy attendees and discuss how (if it did) the event exceeded your company or organization’s expectations. 

The third paragraph on the second page is your audience data, which should utilize pie charts, graphs, the whole nine.

You’re not just recycling audience stats from your sponsorship proposal, though. Instead, you’re updating the numbers based on your most current audience data, which you likely acquired at the event!

You promised the sponsor that X people would come, and so now it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. 

Don’t just present plain attendance numbers. Break down your audience of attendees into smaller groups. Who are they? Where do they live? What industry do they work in? How much money do they make?

You know the demos that matter to your sponsor very well by this point. Take those niched audience segments and highlight them front and center.

You might use percentages to represent your various audience groups, like 25 percent of attendees are accountants who earn $78k per year. 

Page Three – A Chart of Your Assets/Activations/Benefits and Their Delivery Status

This is the crux of your fulfillment report. 

As I mentioned in the last section, you have to go through every asset, every benefit, and every activation you promised to the sponsor in writing and then give the asset a status of being either delivered or undelivered.

You can use a third status–over delivered–if you want, but this isn’t necessary. 

Put this information in a chart with five columns: the asset/activation in column one, the status in column two, notes in column three, what you charged in column four, and what your assets are actually worth in column five. 

I recommend including a notes section in your chart so you can provide further details. This is where you could write about exceeding certain expectations on deliverables.

Also, if you failed to meet the objectives of a sponsor for some of your deliverables, you have a brief opportunity to explain why.

This section may not be a perfect chart full of “delivered, delivered, delivered,” in the status section. That’s okay. Your sponsor isn’t expecting perfection, but I must stress that they’re expecting honesty.

Besides, in some instances, it’s not necessarily your fault if an asset or activation wasn’t delivered. 

Perhaps the sponsor changed their mind about something they wanted last-minute. You still have to put “did not deliver” for the status, but it’s not your fault.

Page Four – Photos, Samples, and Everything Else

The next page of the fulfillment report is to illustrate how successful your event, program, or opportunity was. As I mentioned before, the best way to do that is with photos!

You should have had a professional photographer or two on hand at your event. Ask to see their photos from the event and then earmark the ones that showcase your sponsor’s assets, activations, and benefits.

You won’t always use pro photos. Screenshots of a website are sufficient if your assets are website-based.  

Page Five – Thank-You Page

The last page of your sponsorship fulfillment report is simply where you say thanks for the great opportunity. Be genuine and heartfelt but keep this page brief.

You can mention how much the sponsor benefited your event or opportunity, but you mostly want to use this page to segue into discussing feedback so you can improve more next time. 

This feedback will serve as the springboard for your discussion with the sponsor when you two sit down and meet. 

When Do You Send the Sponsorship Fulfillment Report?

Even when all your attendees go home and the last of the cleaning crew is packing it up to go, your event isn’t over until you produce the fulfillment report. 

You don’t want to sit on it for days. I know you might be tired after hosting a fabulous event, program, or opportunity, but you want to put together your sponsorship fulfillment report within 24 hours of your event.

This report is a lot easier to write than the sponsorship proposal. You can borrow information from your proposal, which saves you time. Plus, a lot of the fulfillment report is charts, graphs, and photos. 

Once you write the last page of the report, only then can you consider your event or opportunity 100 percent finished. 

What Is the Point of a Sponsorship Fulfillment Report?

You may bring up the idea of showing a fulfillment report to some sponsors and they’ll look at you like you have two heads. They’ll tell you that they’ve never heard of a fulfillment report and you’re the first one who’s ever mentioned that to them.

This may have you wondering about the exact purpose of a sponsorship fulfillment report. 

Well, I’m here to tell you in this section that a wrap-up report is not optional. Here are the reasons you need this report post-event. 

To Ensure You’re Meeting Objectives

Imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign, deploying the campaign, and then just moving on. You don’t check any of the metrics, you just start work on the next thing.

You would never in a million years do that, right? No, of course not. You invested way too much money.

You can’t skip a sponsorship wrap-up report for very similar reasons. A sponsor gave you a significant sum of money. Now they want to know whether you’re meeting objectives.

You should want to know too! If your company or organization fell short in several areas, you’ll want to determine exactly why that is.

As I mentioned before, sometimes, failing to deliver on an objective is due to the sponsor’s decision-making, not yours. 

Even still, if the failure to meet an objective was something you can control, you have to understand what went wrong so you can do even better the next time around. 

To Legally Protect Your Company 

When you agree to assets delivery, that gets added to a legally-binding contract that you and the sponsor sign. 

Now, I’m no lawyer, but I know that being in breach of contract is a very ugly spot to find yourself in.

If a sponsor erroneously accuses you of underdelivering on some assets, the data in the fulfillment report is proof positive that you did what you said you would and then some. It’s legal protection for your organization or business. 

To that end, a wrap-up report is priceless. 

To Justify to a Sponsor That You’re Worth the Investment

Sometimes I need to remind my sponsorship clients that sponsors are not made of money. They have a budget they need to stick to as well, and achieving that budget requires reviewing spending habits.

You don’t want a sponsor to look at your deal and cross it off their spending list because they’re trying to meet a budget. 

Rather, you want them to realize that you’re indispensable because you deliver the assets you promise and can often overdeliver.

You can do that with the last two columns of your fulfillment report chart. 

If a sponsor spent $10k for a service but the value was $25k, that’s ROI in action.  

You can very quickly prove to the sponsor that your business relationship makes them more money than it costs them. 

To Determine If You Have a Future Sponsorship Opportunity

By the end of the fulfillment report meeting, you want to ask the sponsor point-blank if you two will work together again. 

They’ll hopefully say yes, but they could say no as well. 

Either way, you’ll know right away if you need to replace your sponsor, what your budget should be, and what level of sponsorship income to expect. That’s huge information to have! 

Conclusion  

The sponsorship fulfillment report or wrap-up report is what ends your event, not when everyone goes home. Within 24 hours of your event, you need to produce a five-page report that highlights attendance numbers, deliverables, and whether you over delivered or under delivered.

Oh, and pictures. You need lots of pictures.

With my handy template, you’re ready to make your first sponsorship fulfillment report!