If you’re an event organizer selling tickets through Eventbrite, it’s about to get easier to find sponsors, thanks to integration with a startup called SponsorHub.
SponsorHub founder and CEO Robert Johnston compares the event sponsorship industry to online advertising 12 or 15 years ago — largely unchanged and ripe for disruption by digital technology. That’s where SponsorHub comes in, serving as an ad network for connecting sponsors with event organizers.
With the new partnership, Johnston says organizers can move event listings from Eventbrite to SponsorHub and vice versa with just the click of a button. So you can set up your ticketing and then start looking for sponsorships with barely any extra effort. He adds that it’s a particularly good fit because Eventbrite and SponsorHub both aim at the event “middle market” — things that aren’t giant professional sports games but are still large and high-quality — which represent $25 billion in sponsorships.
Johnston says that for now, there’s no financial component to the deal. It was more about the two companies realizing that it “makes sense to help each other.” Eventbrite approached SponsorHub recently about working together, he says — apparently the event site had been looking at how to add sponsorship capabilities, and partnering seemed easier than building out the technology on its own. SponsorHub, meanwhile, may be able to expand the number of events in its system dramatically.