Sponsor ROI
Your sponsors got 500 scans. Show them the qualified buyers who asked to meet them, why they asked, and what happened next. That is the report renewals are won on.
A real, anonymized sponsor report from a live deployment. No newsletter, no sequence.
Prefer to talk first? Request a demo
Sponsor ROI Report
Anonymized sampleFOST New York 2026, 1,306 registered attendees
Proof of sponsor ROI is a named, per-sponsor account of which qualified attendees engaged that sponsor, what those attendees said they needed, and what next step was agreed. Counts of scans, impressions and booth footfall measure exposure. Proof measures intent, and intent is the only thing that survives contact with a renewal conversation.
A sponsor can't act on an aggregate. The event-level number tells them nothing about their own booth. Attendance is not qualification. No registration form records what someone came to buy. And a conversation with no agreed next step may as well not have happened.
Most sponsorship reporting fails the first test and stops there. It reports what the event did, not 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 is useful for logistics and useless as evidence of value, because it answers a question no sponsor asked.
Better scans do not help. More scans, faster scans, scans enriched with firmographic data: all of it is a longer list of people who stood near you. The sponsor is not asking who was near us. They are asking which ones were worth our time, and a scan has no field that could answer it.
Four things a scan cannot tell a sponsor
The downstream cost is the follow-up. A sponsor leaves with several hundred rows and no way to rank them, so the sales team works the list until it stops returning replies. When the renewal call comes, both sides know it underperformed, and neither can say why. The conversation defaults to price.
Sponsorship reporting tends to answer questions of the event's own choosing. These are the four the sponsor brought with them, in the order they ask them.
01
Not who passed the booth. Who, given a description of what the sponsor does, said that sounds like something I need. A much smaller number, and a far more valuable one. Most events cannot produce it at all.
02
The reason, in the attendee's own language, 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 get made, did the meeting happen, was there a follow-up. Events routinely report the top of this funnel and go quiet at the bottom, which is where a sponsor's finance team starts reading.
04
A report that ends at the closing party is an invoice. A report that hands the sponsor named people, stated needs and agreed next steps is the top of their pipeline. Sponsors pay for pipeline.
The difference between the two columns below is not effort or design. It is whether the underlying data was collected before the event or inferred after it.
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 were made and what was agreed |
| Numbers | Percentages without denominators | Every figure stated as a count over its base |
| Next year | Rate card | Audience composition the sponsor can price a tier against |
The denominator row matters more than it looks. A sponsor who finds one unsourced percentage stops trusting the other eleven.
None of the columns on the right of that table can be reconstructed after the event. They exist only if someone asked the attendee a question while the answer still mattered to them.
01
Sena messages every opted-in attendee on WhatsApp. No app, no login, no form. At CPME31, 76% of Speed Business participants opted in (159 of 209) and 92% of delivered templates got a reply (113 of 123). Across the whole funnel, including attendees the send never reached, the figure is 65%.
02
Not "interested in AI" checkboxes. Who they want to meet, what they are buying, what problem brought them. 69% of CPME31 attendees completed full discovery in conversation; at FOST Singapore the figure was 61%. Written surveys typically return 10 to 20%.
03
Sena recommends sponsors to the attendees whose stated need matches what that sponsor sells. At CPME31 that produced 932 recommendations across 113 attendees. Every recommendation and conversation lands in the report with its context attached.
The scan pile
The Sena reading
932
recommendations across 113 attendees
CPME31 Toulouse
93%
session match quality (909 of 976 recommendations rated high quality)
FOST Paris
92%
replied to the WhatsApp template (113 of 123 delivered; 65% across the full funnel)
CPME31
Sponsorship renewals are usually lost in a specific way. The sponsor's marketing lead liked the event and wants to come back. Their finance partner asks what came of last year, and the honest answer is a scan export nobody worked. The renewal survives on relationship for a year or two, then it does not.
Evidence changes who is doing the arguing. Instead of the organizer defending the event's value, the sponsor's own marketing lead has something to take into an internal conversation.
Without evidence
"We had good footfall and the brand visibility was strong. The team felt it was a useful two days."
Unfalsifiable, so it gets discounted. 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 to be introduced to us. These meetings happened on site. Here is what each of them said they needed, in their own words."
Now the conversation is about which tier buys more of that, which is the conversation an organizer wants to be having.
The figures come from your event, not from a benchmark. We do not publish numbers we cannot source to a named deployment.
The same data does a second job at pricing time. An event that can describe its audience by stated need, rather than by headcount and job title, is not competing purely on size. That matters most for mid-sized events, which lose headcount comparisons to the largest event in their category every single year.
Here is what the evidence does not cover.
"Our sponsors already scan badges."
Keep the scanners. Scans identify people; they do not qualify them. Sena adds the layer scans cannot: why the attendee came, what they are buying, and whether they asked to meet your sponsor.
"We already run Cvent."
Good. Keep it. Sena is not a registration platform and does not replace one. Here is exactly how the two fit together.
"Will attendees actually reply?"
Where the organizer promotes Sena at registration, yes: 92% of delivered WhatsApp templates got a reply at CPME31, 65% across the whole funnel. Without promotion, engagement drops hard, which is why every deployment ships with an activation plan.
"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 it gets skimmed and filed. A list of named people who described a problem that sponsor solves is a document about them, and it goes to their sales team the same week. The test is whether anything in the report is actionable by the person receiving it.
"Our event is 400 people, not 5,000."
CPME31 had 462 registered and 63 sessions; FOST Paris had 5,000 and 524. The same agent ran both. Sponsor evidence is a data problem rather than a scale problem, and mid-sized events tend to need it more, because they cannot win a headcount comparison. Pricing starts at 3000€ 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. Aggregate counts of scans, impressions and footfall prove attendance, not value. A sponsor renews on evidence that specific buyers, with a stated problem, were in front of them.
Qualification is a claim about intent, so it has to be captured 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, rather than an undifferentiated list.
Five things: who engaged the sponsor and in what role, why they engaged in their own words, which of the sponsor's stated targets they matched, what happened in the conversation, and what the next step is. Every number needs its denominator. A report of percentages with no base reads as marketing, and sponsors treat it that way.
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 that a person stood close enough to a booth to be scanned, which 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 whether the person was buying, selling, or walking to the coffee. At CPME31, 60% of profiled attendees turned out to be there to sell rather than buy, a distinction registration data and badge scans both miss entirely.
Route the right attendees to the booth rather than raising total footfall. Traffic composed of people with no relevant need makes an exhibitor busy, not successful. Matching attendees who stated a need to the sponsors who solve it produces fewer conversations that are worth more, which is the number exhibitors actually judge you on.
Price on audience composition rather than headcount. If you can show that a tier put a sponsor in front of 40 attendees who stated a matching need, that tier has a defensible price. Without composition data, sponsorship pricing is a negotiation over attendee count, which is a race the largest event in your category always wins.
One email. The anonymized FOST New York sponsor report, sent to your inbox.
A real, anonymized sponsor report from a live deployment. No newsletter, no sequence.