Sponsor ROI
Your sponsors got 500 scans. Give each one the names of the qualified buyers, the reason each buyer asked, and what happened next. You win renewals with that report.
A real, anonymized sponsor report from a live event. No newsletter, no sequence.
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Sponsor ROI Report
Anonymized sampleFOST New York 2026, 1,306 registered attendees
Proof of sponsor ROI is a named account for each sponsor. It lists the qualified attendees who engaged that sponsor, what they said they needed, and the next step both sides agreed. Counts of scans, impressions and booth footfall measure exposure. Proof measures intent, which is what a sponsor weighs when they decide to renew.
A sponsor cannot act on an event-wide total, because it tells them nothing about their own booth. Attendance is not qualification either, and no registration form records what someone came to buy. A conversation with no agreed next step is as good as no conversation at all.
Most sponsor reports fail the first test and stop there. They describe what the event did and leave out what the sponsor got.
A badge scan is a record of proximity. It says that at 14:32 a person with this name and this employer stood close enough to a booth for someone to scan them. That helps with logistics and proves nothing about value.
Better scans do not help. Faster scans and scans with company data only give the sponsor a longer list of people who stood nearby. The sponsor wants to know which of those people were worth their time, and a scan has no field for that answer.
Four things a scan cannot tell a sponsor
The cost shows up in the follow-up. A sponsor leaves with several hundred rows and no way to rank them, so the sales team works the list until the replies stop. At the renewal call both sides know the sponsorship underperformed, neither can say why, and the talk turns to price.
Most sponsor reports answer the questions the event picked for itself. These are the four questions the sponsor brought, in the order they ask them.
01
This is the number of attendees who read what the sponsor does and said that they need it. It is much smaller than booth traffic and worth far more, and most events cannot produce it at all.
02
The reason, in the attendee's own words, is what makes a lead workable. "Evaluating an API gateway before the end of Q3" is a sales conversation. "Interested in developer tools" is a checkbox someone ticked to get through a form.
03
Did the introduction happen, did the meeting take place, and did anyone follow up? Events often report the top of this funnel and go quiet at the bottom. A sponsor's finance team starts to read at the bottom.
04
A report that ends at the after-party is an invoice. A report with named people, stated needs and agreed next steps is the top of the sponsor's pipeline, and sponsors pay for pipeline.
A typical report guesses at its data after the event. An evidence-based report asks the attendees before the event starts.
Swipe the table to see the evidence-based column
| Section | Typical sponsor report | Evidence-based sponsor report |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Total attendance, job-title pie chart | What attendees said they came to do, grouped by stated objective |
| Reach | Impressions, logo placements, booth footfall | Attendees whose stated need matched this sponsor's stated targets |
| Leads | Scan export, unranked | Named attendees with the problem they described, in their words |
| Outcome | Not reported | Which introductions happened and what both sides agreed |
| Numbers | Bare percentages | Every percentage says what it is out of |
| Next year | Rate card | Audience composition the sponsor can price a tier against |
Get the numbers row right first. A sponsor who finds one bare percentage doubts the other eleven.
Each line of a good sponsor report comes from a question someone asked the attendee while the answer still mattered to them.
01
Sena messages every attendee who opts in on WhatsApp. They reply with no app to install and no login. At CPME31, 76% of Speed Business participants opted in, and 92% of the attendees who received our message replied. Out of everyone who opted in, 65% replied.
02
Attendees tell Sena who they want to meet, what they want to buy and what problem brought them. An "interested in AI" checkbox captures none of that. At CPME31, 69% of the attendees who talked to Sena described their goals in full. At FOST Singapore, 61% did.
03
Sena recommends sponsors to the attendees whose stated need matches what that sponsor sells. At CPME31, that came to 932 recommendations for 113 attendees. Each recommendation and conversation goes into the report, with the reason behind it.
FOST London 2026
Attendees ask for sponsors by name. In 1 in 3 of the 268 conversations, Sena sent the attendee to a sponsor or an exhibitor, on request or as a recommendation. Sena made 260 sponsor recommendations in total.
Sena recommended 30 of the 33 sponsors (91%) to attendees who said they needed what those sponsors sell. The other three never came up, which points to a poor fit or a thin sponsor profile. You see that before the renewal call.
Read the FOST London case study, or see how this works on a trade show floor.
The scan pile
The Sena report
932
recommendations across 113 attendees
CPME31 Toulouse
93%
of session recommendations were a strong fit (909 of 976)
FOST Paris
92%
replied to our first WhatsApp message (113 of 123 delivered, 65% of everyone who opted in)
CPME31
Most lost renewals go the same way. The person at the sponsor who bought the booth liked the event and wants to come back. Then their finance partner asks what came of last year, and the honest answer is a scan export that nobody worked. The relationship carries the renewal for a year or two, and then it stops.
Evidence changes who makes the case for the event. Your contact at the sponsor takes the proof into their own internal conversation, and you no longer argue for the event's value alone.
Without evidence
"We had good footfall and the brand visibility was strong. The team felt it was a useful two days."
Nobody can check a claim like that, so the sponsor gives it little weight. The negotiation moves to price, and the only lever left is a discount.
With evidence
"This many attendees described a problem we solve. This many asked for an introduction to us. These meetings happened on site. Here is what each of them said they needed, in their own words."
Now the talk is about which tier buys more of that, and that is the conversation you want.
The figures come from your own event. Every number we publish comes from a named event.
The same data does a second job at pricing time. An event that describes its audience by stated need, and not only by headcount and job title, no longer competes on size alone. This matters most for mid-sized events, which lose headcount comparisons to the largest event in their category every year.
The evidence has four limits.
"Our sponsors already scan badges."
Keep the scanners. A scan identifies a person and stops there. Sena adds what scans cannot: why the attendee came, what they want to buy, and whether they asked to meet your sponsor.
"We already run Cvent."
Good, keep it. Sena runs on top of your registration platform and does not replace it. See how the two fit together.
"Will attendees actually reply?"
Yes, when the organizer promotes Sena at registration. At CPME31, 92% of the attendees who received our message replied, and 65% of everyone who opted in. Without promotion, engagement drops hard, so every Sena event comes with a plan to get attendees to opt in.
"Our sponsors never read the report we send now."
They read the ones with their own prospects in them. A deck of event-wide statistics is a document about you, so they skim it and file it. A list of named people with a problem that sponsor solves is a document about them, so it reaches their sales team that week. The test is whether the person who gets the report can act on anything in it.
"Our event is 400 people, not 5,000."
CPME31 had 462 registered attendees and 63 sessions, and FOST Paris had 5,000 and 524. The same agent ran both. Sponsor evidence is a data problem, and the size of the event does not change it. Mid-sized events tend to need it more, because they cannot win a headcount comparison. Pricing starts at 3,000€ per event.
Give each sponsor a named account of which qualified attendees engaged them, what those attendees said they needed, and what the agreed next step was. Totals of scans, impressions and footfall prove only attendance. A sponsor renews on evidence that specific buyers, with a stated problem, were in front of them.
Qualification is a claim about intent, so you have to capture it before the booth. Ask every attendee what they came to do, in their own words, and carry that answer through to the exhibitor report. The exhibitor then sees which of their conversations came from people who had already described the problem that exhibitor solves.
It needs five things. First, who engaged the sponsor and in what role, and why they engaged, in their own words. Then which of the sponsor's stated targets they matched, what happened in the conversation, and what the next step is. Every percentage says what it is out of. Sponsors ignore a report of bare percentages.
A qualified lead has a stated need, a role that can act on it, and a next step someone agreed to. A badge scan has none of those. It records only that a person stood close to a booth. That is why scan lists convert poorly, and why sponsors discount them when they price next year.
A scan records proximity and identity. It cannot tell a sponsor if the person came to buy, came to sell, or was on the way to the coffee. At CPME31, 60% of profiled attendees came to sell, and registration data and badge scans both miss that difference completely.
Send the right attendees to the booth, and treat total footfall as the wrong target. Traffic from people with no relevant need keeps an exhibitor busy and fills no pipeline. When you match attendees who stated a need to the sponsors who solve it, you get fewer conversations that are worth more. Exhibitors judge you on that number.
Price on audience composition instead of headcount. Say you can show that a tier put a sponsor in front of 40 attendees who stated a need that sponsor meets. That tier has a defensible price. Without that data, sponsorship pricing is a negotiation over attendee count, which is a race the largest event in your category always wins.
We send the anonymized FOST New York sponsor report to your inbox in one email.
A real, anonymized sponsor report from a live event. No newsletter, no sequence.