Opinion: How Social Purpose Can Lead To Profit

Lesa Ukman, an entrepreneur, writer, speaker and founder of IEG, considers why diversity, inclusion and sustainability are becoming ever more important as brands target millennials and sponsorship success through social good…

It has been fascinating to see how partnerships, capitalism and technology have evolved since I first got involved in sponsorship marketing in the early 1980s. Sometimes one has driven the other to adopt new norms and behaviors, and visa versa, as they jointly seek to appeal to the ever-changing attitudes of consumers. And technology has opened up incredible, and unexpected, opportunities in an age of digital disruption and radical transparency.

For me, two of the biggest trends impacting business, and sponsorship propositions, today are social media and social responsibility, or what we at ProSocial Valuation call ‘Social Opportunity’. While often treated as two separate strands, social media and social responsibility are inextricably linked. And I can therefore only applaud that the world’s largest and most influential sports awards, the BT Sport Industry Awards, are now recognising the new drivers and dynamics embedded within sponsorship through the new Diversity and Inclusion Award and the Sustainability Initiative of the Year Award. I feel that these awards will shine a light on some of the most creative success stories in sports marketing and will come to dominate sponsorship strategy in the coming years.

Sports partnerships are being used not only to build brands and businesses to create shareholder value as they have done for decades, but are now also integral to creating social progress, online and off, as projects adopt value creation strategies grounded in social purpose. Sustainability, diversity and inclusion are key strands to appeal to millennials who want to engage with brands which they truly feel reflect and promote their own values. For decades, price, quality, and convenience have been the principal drivers of consumer decisions. Today, those drivers are competing with another important motivator: social capital. Individuals and corporations are turning attention to social good in response to new forms of communication and access to information that cast a spotlight on the values people, organisations and businesses reflect.

This not only naturally leads to positive social impact and enhanced revenue opportunities for the sponsor, but are increasingly recognised as important assets rather than as a cost, as the social good initiatives attract top talent, a more diverse talent pool (which in turn drives innovation), enhanced employee engagement and interaction, building brand love and developing a positive corporate culture.

The BT Sport Industry Awards have been forward thinking and wise to invite entries that illustrate not only campaigns that improve commercial results but that have also created social capital through tangible societal impact and genuine change. Whilst measuring business performance can be relatively straight forward, quantifying social good is a new shift and recent approaches have not been fit for purpose. The market for good is constantly growing, evolving and transforming, yet the ways we measure good are stuck in the past. Stakeholders in CSR sectors are leveraging the promise of new technologies to deliver good, yet not using the promise of big data to measure good… It is why I launched ProSocial Valuation, to apply the transformative power of big data and big insights to social good programs. We are known for the frames we developed to value and measure sponsorship ROI.

This time around rather than assessing social good investments through the lens of what it produced for brands and rightsholders, we would look at value through the lens of the beneficiaries and society at large. ProSocial Valuation measures a unit of social impact by mathematically translating it into a single, universal currency of social capital (the value created for beneficiaries and society, rather than the brands & rightsholders). Armed with concrete measures of success, brands can both celebrate and improve their social impact as well as use the data to tap into market forces to drive more investment.

I’m excited to see which brands, initiatives and partnerships will submit entries into the new awards. I will celebrate all the entries, and I hope that the winners act as an inspiration to others stakeholders in sports sponsorship as they highlight standout efforts in this space.

Lesa Ukman is a thought-leading entrepreneur, writer and speaker in assigning value to marketing collaborations (www.lesaukman.com). In 1982, Lesa founded IEG in Chicago and built a company that spawned a new industry, one currently worth more than $85 billion. In 2006 she sold IEG to WPP, the world’s largest advertising, marketing and communications services group. Lesa is an avid champion of sponsorship’s potential for a broader impact on society and has now launched ProSocial Valuation, the first company to be able to provide a transparent, data-driven and universal measurement to quantify social good and social impact.