A 9-step guide to building a digital corporate sponsorship program for your career center
With institutions across the country facing funding cuts, many career services leaders are reinforcing their budgets by getting digital corporate sponsors for their career centers.
And employers, increasingly struggling to connect with the next generation of talent, are eager to participate.
For example, Spelman College’s career center was sponsored by Carrier, Salesforce, Wells Fargo, and Zynga. University of Washington’s is sponsored by Alaska Airlines, AT&T, BECU, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola. Langston University’s is sponsored by Dell, Boeing, Hormel Foods, Paycom, and more.
Corporate sponsorship programs are not new to many career centers, with employers traditionally sponsoring in-person events like career fairs, info sessions, and interview rooms. But with the continued emphasis on digital engagement—and more schools investing in expanding their digital presence—now is the perfect time to launch a digital corporate sponsorship program.
A digital corporate sponsorship program is a modern way for companies to sponsor a college or university’s career center. Typically, the company donates a certain amount of money in exchange for sponsoring virtual events and/or having a digital presence in the physical career center (monitors, TV screens, etc.), on the website/virtual career center, or social media.
While traditional in-person event sponsorships are great, they only give the employer 24-48 hours of brand visibility. Plus, events can only happen so often (and require significant work from career services staff), which limits the amount of revenue a career center can drive from those sponsorships. Digital sponsorships, on the other hand—especially through a virtual career center—give employers 24/7 brand visibility.
Many career centers offer a variety of sponsorship tiers or packages, with different benefits and price points for each. Some have limits on how many sponsors they’ll accept, while others will accept any sponsor who wants to participate.
While it can take time to get a digital corporate sponsorship program up and running, the overall time commitment is far less than managing frequent on-campus visits, career fairs, and other elements of traditional corporate sponsorships. (Especially if you have a lot of sponsors).
For small teams, digital sponsorships are a way to drive revenue, engage more students, potentially offload programming, and offer more value to employers in a less time-intensive way.
Corporate sponsorship programs are a huge benefit to every party involved and offer a structured way for companies and institutions to partner to help students connect their education to great jobs.
Here are a few reasons why corporate sponsorships are a win-win-win:
Ready to start building a digital corporate sponsorship program for your career center? Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started:
This might seem like an overly simple first step, but before you go any further it’s important to set your North Star goals. Why are you launching a digital corporate sponsorship program? What are you hoping to achieve?
Are you hoping to drive revenue for your office? If so, how much? And what are your plans for spending that revenue? Perhaps you’re looking to grow your team, upgrade your website, expand programming, purchase new tools and technologies, etc.
Are you hoping to drive stronger relations with employers? If so, which ones? Think about how you’d like to use your digital corporate sponsorship program to engage with employers throughout the year.
Are you looking to offload any programming? For example, Leonelle Thompson, former Director of Career and Professional Development at Langston University (and a one-woman team), invited her sponsors to help conduct mock interviews and resume reviews—tasks she’d normally do. If you have a small team, this could be an immensely helpful part of your sponsorship program. Plus, it offers high visibility and meaningful brand value for employers.
Now that you’ve established goals, it’s time to zero in on what you can offer your potential sponsors. To hone your pitch, first determine what’s special about your school, curriculum, students, etc.
Next, consider what kind of exposure you can offer sponsors, and what will provide them the most value.
If you have a standard career center website, you could incorporate sponsor names and logos throughout your site. You could also put sponsor info on any monitors or TVs in your physical career center, include them in emails, and do regular features on your career center’s social media pages.
However, keep in mind that it can be challenging to quantify the results of putting sponsor information on TVs in your career center. You can’t measure “impressions” or “views” like you can with a website (via Google Analytics), social media, or a virtual career center.
Speaking of virtual career centers, if you have the uConnect platform, there are several built-in options for showcasing and integrating digital sponsors in the platform:
Pro tip: If you have uConnect, you can ask your customer success manager (or email support@gouconnect.com) to help you pull data about how many visitors are on your site every month. This can help you prove ROI as you recruit and retain sponsors.
This is where we get into the nitty-gritty. How many levels/tiers of sponsorships do you want to offer and for how much? And what should be included in each level? As you’ll see in the four examples later in this article, there can be a wide variety of price points, packages, and a la carte options.
First, we need to consider what we talked about in the first two steps: goals and offering. This can help determine price points and how many sponsors you want to take on. For example, if you have a lot of employers looking to recruit your students (like Spelman College does), one of your goals might be exclusivity to help sponsors stand out in a large crowd. In this case, you’d likely want fewer sponsors (maybe 5-10).
If you’re looking to engage as many employers as possible and drive a large amount of revenue, open your program to any sponsor who wants to participate.
Pro tip: If you have a large group of sponsors, consider building an advisory board. (See how the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston does this in the examples section).
Here are a couple ways we’ve seen digital corporate sponsorship programs structured:
If you’re not quite as lucky as Spelman College, which has dozens of employers knocking on their doors, you’ll likely need to do some outreach. But first, you’ll want to research the employers who would A) be most likely to want to sponsor your career center, and B) be the best fit for your students.
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you research:
Speaking of advancement, check with your school’s advancement and/or legal teams to determine if sponsorship donations could be considered tax deductible. We’re not legal experts on this topic, but some corporate sponsorships can be tax deductible, which is an important selling point for employers.
For example, one career services leader told us they tried to offer their sponsors discounts, but employers wanted to pay the full fair market value because it was tax deductible. However, not all sponsorship donations are tax deductible, and like anything tax related, there’s a lot of fine print. So be sure to check with your institution’s advancement and/or legal teams before mentioning that to employers.
Once you have your list of prospective sponsors, it’s time to reach out. If you have a small team or you’re strapped for time, you might consider hiring student interns to help with this.
There are many ways to do outreach, with phone, LinkedIn, or email being key ones. However, here are a few ideas to make your outreach stand out:
You’ve signed your sponsors, and now it’s time to add them to your career center. Congrats! Work with your staff (and if you’re a uConnect user, your CSM) to add company names and logos throughout your website or virtual career center, including on career community pages.
Consider building specific web pages for each of your sponsors, where students can learn more about the company and view any open jobs or internships. If you have uConnect, these pages are built into your platform. All you need to do is add the information, videos, and links you want. You can see how Spelman College built out pages for two of their sponsors: Carrier and Wells Fargo.
If you’re planning to showcase sponsors on TVs, monitors, or social media, you’ll likely need some graphic design. Consider hiring student interns to help you with this, or if you have a marketing team, assign this task to them. Canva is also a great free tool for graphic design.
Next, tell your students about your sponsors, what they do, if they’re hiring, where students can learn more, when any on-site visits will occur, etc. If you’re planning to integrate sponsors into your emails, this is a great time to start.
Proving ROI for a digital corporate sponsorship program can be challenging—especially if a sponsor also gives money to other departments on campus or the university as a whole. How do you know if an employer’s sponsorship of your career center (vs. their sponsorship of the MBA program or the LGBTQ+ student organization, etc.) is what led to the company hiring your students?
If you’re unable to tie hires directly to your digital sponsorship program, here are a few other ideas to prove ROI:
It’s important to regularly gather feedback from your sponsors to gauge how they’re feeling about your sponsorship program. Do they feel like they’re getting their money’s worth? Are they seeing an uptick in interest from students? Are they happy with the sponsorship options, pricing, and process?
You can gather feedback in several ways. You might simply tell sponsors they are welcome to give feedback to your team at any time. Or you could send an annual survey via Google Forms. Or you could do what the University of Houston Bauer College of Business does and form an advisory board and ask for feedback during semiannual board meetings. (Learn more in the examples section below.)
Regardless of your methods, the relationships you build with your sponsors will likely determine the quality of your feedback. Make sure your staff is equipped to offer great customer service to every sponsor.
While each career services team does things a little differently, those who have virtual career centers powered by uConnect have several built-in options for corporate sponsorship. Here are a few examples of schools (three uConnect users and one non-uConnect user) that have built successful digital corporate sponsorship programs for their career centers.
Note: Sponsors may have changed since the publication of this article.
As we noted earlier, Spelman College only accepts a handful of digital corporate sponsors every year. And that’s largely because there are so many companies trying to recruit at Spelman that Harold Bell, Director of the Office of Career Planning and Development, knew he needed to keep the sponsorship program exclusive. That way, sponsors can stand out from the rest of the crowd and get even more value out of their sponsorship.
Last year, Spelman’s virtual career center was sponsored by Carrier, Wells Fargo, Salesforce, and Zynga for a total of $60,000. That amount paid for the uConnect virtual career center platform, plus add-ons like the labor market insights module, outcomes data visualization module, LinkedIn Learning integration, Candid Career videos integration, and more.
Spelman’s new virtual career center not only scaled the career service team’s impact, but it also created a one-stop-shop for students to get career resources and learn about potential employers through the sponsorship program. Investing in this career hub gives Spelman the digital real estate it needs to engage employer sponsors in perpetuity.
Speaking of real estate, here’s how Spelman integrates their sponsors into the virtual career center:
Carrier is Spelman’s premier sponsor and has committed to giving $20,000 a year for five years ($100,000 total). As a result, the Carrier logo is at the bottom of almost every major page.
On the top right of the homepage, there’s a “Sponsors” button that takes visitors to a sponsors page listing all the current digital sponsors.
From the sponsors homepage, visitors can click on each sponsor box to find more information about that sponsor—including a company description, videos, links to open jobs, benefits information, social media feeds, and more.
Perhaps the most innovative way Spelman incorporates sponsors into their virtual career center is by having them sponsor career community pages related to their industry. For example, Wells Fargo currently sponsors the financial services career community, and Salesforce sponsored the technology career community last year.
For more details on how Spelman College uses their uConnect virtual career center platform for digital sponsorships, read our latest case study.
Like Spelman College, Langston University’s career center team limited the number of corporate sponsors to 10. Leonelle Thompson, former Director of Career and Professional Development at Langston, was a one-woman team when she launched the sponsorship program for the career center in 2021. She knew she could only manage 10 sponsors, at most—especially since all or most sponsors would want to do an on-campus visit at some point during the year.
Leonelle put together a PDF of sponsorship options that can be found on the “Employers” section of Langton’s virtual career center. Options range from $750 one-off sponsorships to an all-inclusive $5,000 package.
To get the program started, Leonelle researched dozens of potential employer sponsors based on if they hired Langston graduates, were located near Langston’s location in Oklahoma, were hiring for roles that aligned with Langston’s top programs, and more.
Then she invited them all to an employer summit in July 2021, with options to attend in person ($50 fee) or virtually ($25 fee). At the summit, Leonelle gave an overview of the sponsorship options and benefits, and successfully signed 10 sponsors.
For more details on how Leonelle set up Langston’s digital corporate sponsorship program, watch the recording of our recent sponsorship webinar.
For more than eight years, the University of Houston Bauer College of Business has integrated corporate sponsors into their career center. In that time, they’ve built a sophisticated and successful corporate sponsorship program that now includes 20 sponsors, over $100,000 dollars in annual revenue, a new virtual career center, and an advisory board.
Raji Aiyer, Director of Employer Relations, said there’s no limit to the number of sponsors. And the main point of contact from every sponsoring company also joins the college’s advisory board, which meets twice a year (in January and June) to review the past semester and talk about the upcoming one. In these meetings, Aiyer and her colleagues ask the board members what hard and soft skills they’re looking for, how they are changing their interview process (e.g. leaning into virtual interviews), how they’re recruiting, and more.
Aiyer said the college takes an organic approach to employer sponsorships. If they’re having a conversation with a company and the company asks how they can support the career center, Aiyer and her staff show them a PDF with different sponsorship tiers ranging from $2,000-$20,000.
Like Spelman and Langston, the Bauer College of Business gives their sponsors prime real estate on their virtual career center. For example, on the homepage, there’s a running ticker of sponsor logos and a large hero image in the image carousel at the top of the page.
Rather than pitching their sponsorship program, Aiyer said her team focuses on building great relationships with employers and providing such a good experience for them at career fairs, resume reviews, mock interviews, and other programming that employers want to support the career center. This includes having four people on the employer relations team, each of whom focus on different industries.
“Every company is a valued partner, regardless if they’re a sponsor, because they want to hire our students. We treat them all with a high level of care, whether they’re a one-person company or a Fortune 500 company,” Aiyer said.
The Oregon State University College of Business is a great example of how to structure a digital corporate sponsorship program with a traditional career center website. Their sponsors currently include Sherwin Williams, Enterprise Holdings, Cintas, Fisher Investments, CED, Aflac, Paycom, and more.
They offer three sponsorship levels, ranging from $2,500 to $10,000, and including benefits like:
Sponsor logos are also featured on student experience pages like OSU’s Sales Academy program, which introduces sales fundamentals to students through “personal coaching from industry experts, hands-on sales simulations, and sales competitions.”
With economic uncertainty on the horizon, and budget constraints already a reality, career services teams across the country may need to get creative when it comes to securing funding. Building a digital corporate sponsorship program for your virtual career center is a great way to get additional funding, help companies get in front of students, and expose students to potential employers.
To learn more about how you can use the uConnect platform to facilitate a digital corporate sponsorship program, fill out the form below.