Working with vendors and sponsors

A market, a festival or a conference is not one organization running an event. It is several businesses cooperating on a date, and treating that as one inbox and a shared spreadsheet does not scale past about a dozen participants.

Vendors

Suppliers and stallholders get their own portal. They see what they are assigned to and can respond to it, so confirmations are recorded rather than remembered.

That is the substance of it. The spreadsheet approach fails in a specific way: three versions in circulation, none of them current, and no way to tell whether the caterer confirmed for Saturday or merely said "should be fine" in an email in March. When the answer lives with the assignment, there is one version and it is the one everybody is looking at.

You also get a list of who is coming that is a list rather than an archaeology exercise. On the morning of the event that is the difference between a load-in schedule and a series of phone calls.

Sponsors

Sponsors get a login showing the events they are attached to. Sponsorship packages record what was agreed.

One detail here is more important than it looks: the agreed amount is stored on the agreement itself, not read from a live price list at billing time.

Consider what happens without that. A sponsor signs for a Gold package at €5,000 in January. In June you revise your rate card and Gold becomes €6,500. If the invoice is generated by looking up the current price of "Gold", you have just re-priced a signed agreement, and your sponsor receives an invoice for money they never agreed to pay. The reverse is worse: delete or rename the package and the lookup finds nothing, so the invoice quietly bills zero and nobody notices until the year-end reconciliation.

Snapshotting the amount at the moment of agreement means the invoice reflects what was actually agreed, permanently, whatever happens to your catalogue afterwards. It is a small structural decision that removes an entire category of uncomfortable conversation.

Applications

Sponsors and vendors can apply, and you approve or decline.

What this gives you beyond convenience is a record of who asked and what was decided. At renewal time that is considerably more useful than searching last year's email — you can see who applied and was declined (often the best prospects for a smaller package), who applied late, and who you approved but never heard from again.

It also makes the decline defensible. "We were full" is easier to say when there is a record of when they applied and when you filled up.

Scoped access

None of this exposes your finances or your attendee list. Vendors and sponsors see their own relationship with your event and nothing else — not each other's arrangements, not what anybody else paid, not who is attending.

That last one is worth stating explicitly because sponsors sometimes ask for the attendee list, and it is not yours to give. Your attendees gave you their data to attend your event; passing it to a commercial partner is a separate legal question with a separate answer, and the platform not making it easy is a feature rather than a limitation. What you can legitimately offer a sponsor is aggregate information about your audience and access to it at the event, which is what they actually want anyway.

Practical advice

• Onboard partners early and in one pass. The portal removes the email chain, not the need to agree things.
• Record the package as agreed, including anything unusual. The exception you granted verbally in February will be disputed in October.
• Keep the applications from people you turned down. They are next year's pipeline and they already know your event.