Sponsor pipeline

The list sponsorship actually gets sold from. Every brand you might approach gets a row, and every row sits in one of six named stages: prospect, contacted, call, proposal, closed, fulfilled. The row itself holds the company, the name of the actual human you deal with, the date you last spoke, and the single next thing that has to happen. Two things make it work. The first is that fulfilled is a real stage, not an afterthought, because that is where renewals come from. The second is that the number to watch early is how many named prospects are in the pipeline at all, since most rows will die and that is the arithmetic rather than a failure. At community scale this is a spreadsheet tab, not software.

Source: The six-stage spreadsheet pipeline (prospect → contacted → call → proposal → closed → fulfilled) is standard practice at community scale; dedicated sponsor-management platforms only appear at property and agency scale (SponsorCX). The DevOpsDays organizing guide describes the same job in team terms: “it helps to have a dedicated local organizer or two act as the contact with the sponsors to track prospects, payment, and giving them discount codes” (devopsdays.org/organizing). TEDx describes the outreach as a staged sequence rather than a single email, running from a letter to a one-page brief to a call to a presentation to detailed follow-up, and their nine-step sponsorship process ends on activation, a thank-you with photos, and keeping in touch for next year (TEDx Organizer Guide, sponsors and partnerships). The stage names are this course’s; the practice underneath them is theirs.

First used in: 2.4 · Sponsorship II: selling and activation.