SPONSORS
PARTNERS
SEF publishes best practice guide to sponsorship measurement
The Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum (SEF) has published Sponsorship Measurement: A Best Practice Guide, a practical framework for measuring the commercial contribution of sponsorship. The guide considers what this means for how brands, rights holders and agencies plan, evaluate and justify their partnerships, and is written for the sponsorship and marketing leads, agency strategists, rights holder commercial teams and finance functions who plan, buy and approve them.
The guide sets out seven stages:
- Setting integrated objectives
- Identifying the KPIs that measure each objective
- Selecting tools and establishing a baseline
- Building in incrementality tests
- Triangulating the data
- Building the chain of evidence
- Calculating profit before ROI
For each stage it states what to do, what good looks like and the common failure to avoid.
The guide responds to issues that recur across the sector, including the reporting of exposure as an effect rather than an input, the assumption that brand metrics are an inevitable result of exposure and of little commercial value, and the use of the term ROI to mean anything other than a ratio of profit to cost. It draws on established advertising effectiveness research, including the work of Les Binet and Peter Field, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, System1 and the IPA, adapted to the conditions of sponsorship.
" Rather than treat sponsorship measurement as a standalone discipline, I wanted to show that it works through the same mechanisms as advertising, and it can be evaluated in the same way. The guide puts includes a model of how advertising works, tailored to the particular conditions of sponsorship, and sets it out in seven stages that a team can apply to its next partnership, whatever the size of the business," said Rory Natkiel, author of the guide, founder of Box Count and co-founder and Chair of SEF
Measurement tools are mapped to four company sizes, from businesses under £1m to those of £0.5bn and above, across business, brand, behavioural and sales effects. The guide also recommends that a baseline is recorded before activation, and that at least one incrementality test with a defined control is designed before launch.
A worked example follows a fictional women's fashion brand, Forma, through every stage of a front-of-shirt partnership with a Women's Super League team. Judged on year one alone, the sponsorship returns an ROI of −0.02:1. Once the value of the 9,650 new customers it recruited is forecast across years two to four, however, the lifetime ROI is 3.43:1.
Rory clarifies: "This is the problem Binet and Field identified in The Long and the Short of It over a decade ago: short windows evaluating direct sales systematically undervalue the activity that grows brands. In Forma’s case the sponsorship has recruited customers whose value arrives over years. A 6-12 month evaluation window would call it a failure; the brand might even exit the deal early based on a loss, end the measurement programme without ever realising the partnership actually performed, and miss out on the value of years 2+."
The guide includes two contributor perspectives. Bruce Cook, founder and managing director of SponsorLab, writes on setting effective objectives and commented: "The agreed objectives are a rallying cry to your team and the supporting cast as to your ambition and the mission before you all."
Billy Ryan, Head of Analytics and Effectiveness at the7stars, writes on incrementality and said: "The goal should be convergence, not methodological perfection. Multiple independent methods, with different weaknesses, pointing towards the same conclusion can provide greater confidence than stretching one theoretically superior methodology beyond what the sponsorship or data can support."
The guide's closing position is that none of this requires an econometrics budget. Most of it requires asking, before activation, what would have to be true for the sponsorship to have worked, what would happen if it did not run, and how that would be known.
The guide is published a week ahead of All To Play For, SEF's research in partnership with the IPA, which is published on 7 October 2026 and refers to the guide.
Sponsorship Measurement: A Best Practice Guide is free to download at www.sponsorshipeffect.org/measurement-guide.
