How You Can Activate Your Sponsors on haku And Make More Money

When your sponsors ask how the last year went, they want more than a deer-in-the-headlights look and some metrics around your attendance numbers. If you point to logos on shirts, banners at the venue, maybe even an influencer shoutout or two, they’ll nod politely and ask the question they actually care about. “So what value did we actually get out of it?”

Because the truth is, sponsorships have outgrown exposure as their metric of choice. Sponsors don’t just want to be seen anymore. No. Instead, they want something they can measure, defend internally, and confidently renew.

This is a wakeup call for race directors and event organizers. If you want partnerships that grow over time, not deals that have to be resold from scratch every season, you need to close the gap between what sponsors are asking for and what you can provide them. 

That gap between expectation and reality is exactly why haku built Sponsor Connect as a new capability within our all-in-one platform. Let’s take a look at how Sponsor Connect can make you and your sponsors more money. 

The Shift From Mere Exposure to Measurable Outcomes

With Sponsor Connect, you can offer your sponsors a unique way to show up for your participants. 

Instead of living on the sidelines, sponsors become part of the participant experience itself. Their programs, offers, or memberships show up directly inside registration flows and participant accounts. These are the exact moments when people are already engaged, motivated, and paying attention. This is essentially a sponsor brand’s dream situation. 

Participants opt in on their own terms, which means they’re already open to hearing from sponsors. Communication feels natural and welcome, with no spam and no extra campaigns needed. Because the opt-in happens seamlessly within the event experience, sponsors connect with an engaged audience that’s genuinely interested, resulting in more meaningful connections and better leads.

Like flipping a switch can turn on the lights in a dark room, this one capability effectively turns sponsorships from an exposure play to an actual revenue enabler for your sponsor partners.

Take a tour of the Sponsor Connect feature below. Click the continue button inside to proceed or come back after you've finished reading the blog!

How Sponsor Connect Gets Brands to Lean In

For sponsors, in-app communications with opted-in participants makes an immediate difference. 

They’re no longer guessing whether their logo was noticed or hoping someone remembered them after the event. This isn’t to say there is no room for placements along your course. Those remain valuable. But now your sponsors can acquire new loyalty members, capture leads, and engage participants at peak intent, all in one place. 

Sponsor Connect makes it easier to communicate this value back to them too. Instead of vague post-event reports, they get real data with outcomes and metrics they can track. They can then turn that into proof points they can take back to their team and say, this worked.

How Sponsor Connect Makes You More Money

For event organizers, Sponsor Connect unlocks an entirely new kind of sponsorship value.

Instead of selling only space, awareness, and brand presence, you’re selling actual performance metrics, real brand activations, and delivering direct access to interested participants that sponsors will happily pay a premium for.

There are a few ways you can generate this extra revenue: 

1. You can create premium sponsorship tiers that go beyond branding. 
2. You can upsell access to specific participant segments, even within the same event. 
3. You can generate referral revenue or negotiate a finder’s fee.
4. You can acquire new sponsors for niche products that wouldn’t have sponsored you before.

And because sponsors can clearly see the value they’re getting, the sponsorship conversations shift from “how much does this cost?” to “how much revenue can we generate?” 

All This Results in A Better Experience For Participants, Too

Pulling back the curtain a little bit, none of this works if participants don’t trust it, which is why Sponsor Connect is built around transparency and choice. While your sponsors (and therefore you) get access to new revenue opportunities, your participants get something a little different. 

Instead of having to search for information themselves, or sort through email inboxes that are already too full, your participants can discover relevant programs and exclusive benefits tied to brands they already associate with your event. And because they opt in on their own terms, they stay in control of their data and best of all they’re offered something genuinely useful.

That added usefulness and value is key. When done right, sponsor activation doesn’t feel like advertising, but rather a good recommendation in the moment participants need it most. 

Seamlessly Built Into The Moments That Matter Most

What makes Sponsor Connect powerful isn’t just what it does, but also where it lives. Instead of redirecting participants away from your registration flow, website, or app, sponsor experiences are embedded directly into registration and participant accounts, not bolted on afterward. 

This means that the experiences you deliver for your participants can be fully branded to match sponsor guidelines without disrupting their activities. You can even target specific experiences to specific segments, whether you break those down by event category or audience demographics. And when it comes time to prove results for your sponsors, there is no added manual work or messy reporting. Instead, opted-in participant data is delivered automatically through real-time webhooks or simple exports.

The Future of Sponsorships Is Now Here

In our recent eBook Securing Tourism Boards and Sponsorships, we shared how sponsor expectations have shifted and how endurance events can prove both economic impact and community value. It has some great insights into this topic. 

If you’re a haku customer, now’s the time to start building your first Sponsor Connect program and bring even more sponsor value into your next event. Get in touch with your CX rep to ask them how you can start using this new capability. 

And if you’re not using haku yet, here’s some food for thought. Are you going to stand there like a deer-in-the-headlights the next time you need to communicate value to your sponsors? Or are you ready to turn your event into a value engine that makes your sponsors (and you) more money while delivering a better experience at the same time?

Let’s talk.