---
name: sponsorship-evaluation-scorecard
description: "Scores an inbound sponsorship opportunity against 6 weighted criteria — audience fit, reach quality, cost efficiency, strategic alignment, past ROI signals, and execution risk — producing a 0–100 composite score, a Sponsor / Negotiate / Pass verdict, and a negotiation checklist. Use when evaluating a conference, newsletter, podcast, community, or event sponsorship request and deciding whether to fund it, negotiate terms, or decline."
argument-hint: "[sponsorship-name] [ask-amount]"
allowed-tools: ["Read"]
---

# Sponsorship Evaluation Scorecard

## Purpose
Turn a messy inbound sponsorship pitch into a defensible, comparable score so a DevRel or developer marketing team can decide fast — fund it, negotiate the terms, or decline — without relitigating the criteria every time. Produces a weighted 0–100 score, a clear verdict, and the exact terms to renegotiate before signing.

## When to Use
Invoke this skill when the user asks to:
- Evaluate an inbound conference, meetup, or event sponsorship request
- Score a newsletter, podcast, or YouTube sponsorship offer
- Decide whether a community or Discord sponsorship is worth the spend
- Compare two or more competing sponsorship opportunities on the same rubric
- Justify a sponsorship decision to a budget owner or leadership
- Build a repeatable scoring process for a full quarter of inbound requests

## Inputs Required
Before starting, collect:
- **Sponsorship name & type**: The property and format (e.g., conference booth, newsletter placement, podcast read, community sponsor tier)
- **Ask amount**: Total cost being requested, plus any in-kind or travel costs
- **Audience described**: Who the property claims to reach — role, seniority, stack, size
- **Our target developer**: The persona we actually want to reach (role, language/framework, buying influence)
- **Deliverables offered**: What we get — logo, booth, talk slot, dedicated email, link, attendee list, etc.
- **Reach data**: Any numbers provided — attendees, subscribers, downloads, open rate, historical
- **Prior history**: Have we sponsored this or a similar property before? Any results (signups, trials, pipeline)?

If reach data or prior history is missing, score those criteria on best-available evidence and flag the gap as a data risk in the output.

## Instructions

### Step 1: Score the 6 Criteria (each 0–10, then weighted)

Rate each criterion 0–10, apply the weight, and record a one-line justification. Weights sum to 100%.

**Criterion 1 — Audience Fit (weight 30%)**
How closely the property's real audience matches our target developer.
- 9–10: Core audience is our exact persona (right role, right stack, buying influence)
- 6–8: Strong overlap; some audience is adjacent but valuable
- 3–5: Partial overlap; a minority of the audience is our target
- 0–2: Wrong audience — student-heavy, wrong stack, non-technical, or non-buyers
- Penalize vague audience claims ("50k developers") with no role/seniority breakdown

**Criterion 2 — Reach Quality (weight 20%)**
Effective reach, not vanity reach. Weight engaged reach over raw numbers.
- Discount claimed numbers: newsletter open rate <25% or unverified download counts drop the score
- Reward verifiable, engaged reach (booth foot traffic, talk attendance, active community members)
- Consider persistence: evergreen content (blog, podcast archive) scores higher than a one-day event
- Score reach *among our target segment*, not total audience — 5k relevant beats 50k irrelevant

**Criterion 3 — Cost Efficiency (weight 20%)**
Cost per relevant reach and value of deliverables against the ask.
- Estimate effective CPM against the *relevant* audience: (ask ÷ relevant reach) × 1000
- Benchmark bands: developer newsletter $50–150 relevant CPM; conference booth varies by attendee quality; podcast read $25–75 CPM
- Reward deliverables with lasting or lead-generating value (attendee list, dedicated email, talk slot) over pure logo placement
- Flag any ask where >50% of value is passive logo visibility

**Criterion 4 — Strategic Alignment (weight 15%)**
Fit with current goals beyond raw reach.
- Does it serve a stated objective this quarter (awareness, developer signups, community, hiring/employer brand, product launch timing)?
- Does the property's brand and community values align with ours? (Avoid associations that could harm trust)
- Does it open a relationship (speaking, content, co-marketing) beyond the transaction?
- Score low if it's opportunistic spend with no tie to a current priority

**Criterion 5 — Past ROI Signals (weight 10%)**
Evidence this type of spend has worked for us.
- If we sponsored this exact property before: use measured results (signups, trials, attributed pipeline, cost per signup)
- If new: use nearest comparable (similar format/audience) as a proxy and mark it as a proxy
- Reward properties that can provide case studies or attribution mechanisms (UTM links, promo codes, dedicated landing page)
- Score the *measurability* of the opportunity, not just past outcomes — an untrackable sponsorship is a weaker bet

**Criterion 6 — Execution Risk (weight 5%)**
What could make this fail or cost more than the ask.
- Timeline: enough lead time to prep booth staff, talk, or creative?
- Internal cost: travel, staffing days, content production not in the ask
- Reliability: is the organizer/property established, or first-year and unproven?
- Deduct for tight deadlines, heavy hidden costs, or unproven organizers

### Step 2: Calculate the Composite Score
- Composite = Σ (criterion score ÷ 10 × weight)
- Report the composite as a number out of 100, plus each weighted contribution
- Show the two strongest and two weakest criteria explicitly

### Step 3: Assign the Verdict
Map the composite to a decision:
- **Sponsor (75–100)**: Strong fit — proceed, optionally at proposed terms
- **Negotiate (55–74)**: Worth pursuing only with improved terms — specify what to change
- **Pass (0–54)**: Decline — state the disqualifying criteria plainly

Override rule: if Audience Fit scores ≤3, cap the verdict at Pass regardless of composite — reach and price never fix the wrong audience.

### Step 4: Negotiation Checklist (for Sponsor/Negotiate verdicts)
List 3–6 specific asks to improve the deal before signing:
- Price reduction target or added deliverables to justify the ask
- Attribution mechanism to require (promo code, UTM link, dedicated landing page)
- Higher-value deliverable to request (talk slot, dedicated email, attendee list)
- Success metric and target to agree on up front (e.g., cost per signup threshold)

### Step 5: One-Line Recommendation
State the decision in a single sentence a budget owner could forward without context.

## Output Format
- **Structure**: Scorecard table (criterion, weight, raw score, weighted score, justification) → composite score → verdict → negotiation checklist → one-line recommendation
- **Length**: 500–800 words
- **Format**: Scannable — a scoring table plus short labeled sections, not long prose
- **Sections**: Scorecard table → Composite Score → Verdict → Negotiation Checklist → Recommendation
- **Tone**: Direct, evaluative, budget-conscious — a marketing manager defending spend to leadership, not a salesperson

## Quality Checklist
Before delivering output, verify:
- [ ] All 6 criteria are scored 0–10 with a one-line justification each
- [ ] Weights applied correctly and composite sums to a number out of 100
- [ ] Verdict matches the composite band (75+ Sponsor, 55–74 Negotiate, <55 Pass), with the Audience Fit ≤3 override applied where relevant
- [ ] Cost Efficiency includes an effective CPM against the *relevant* audience, not total reach
- [ ] Missing reach or history data is flagged as a data risk, not silently ignored
- [ ] Negotiation checklist contains at least one attribution/measurement requirement

## Notes
- The most common scoring error is rewarding raw reach — always normalize reach and CPM to the *relevant* segment
- A sponsorship with no attribution mechanism should rarely score above Negotiate; require a promo code or dedicated URL before funding
- When comparing multiple opportunities, run each through the same scorecard and rank by composite — the weighting makes them directly comparable
- Hidden costs (staff travel, booth build, content production) belong in the ask for CPM purposes even if the invoice doesn't include them

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## How to use this skill

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