Welcome to 2023! A new year, and new budgets for those who are on a January-December fiscal year. Through the fall, you received emails regularly from CNGA, asking for help sponsoring our events. They may appear in your inbox more frequently than you might expect. Why? Well, because event sponsorship provides an important part of CNGA’s income and allows us to offer great educational programming and events. A giant THANK YOU to those of you who sponsored events in 2022. We so appreciate you. CNGA’s events also mostly take place in the fall, because of the ebb and flow of activity for our member businesses, so you receive a concentrated number of requests in the second half of the year.
I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain how event sponsorships fit into CNGA’s budget plan. The association performs a balancing act for income—we have income from annual membership dues, ProGreen EXPO and from events, certification and publication sales. It may surprise you how CNGA’s income is structured proportionally, so I thought I’d share a little bit about that.
CNGA is a nonprofit, so we aren’t here to bank a bunch of money, but we are here to be fiscally responsible, provide good value to our members, and maintain a reserve in case of emergency (which came in very handy in 2020 and 2021!). Everyone is all too-aware of how expenses have increased in the past few years.
CNGA’s gross income for 2022 can be categorized as follows: ProGreen EXPO – 38%, Membership dues – 34%, Events – 16%; and all other categories combined (education, certification, publications) – 12%. So, you can see why sponsorship of events is very important to your association’s income stream. We do charge admission to some of our events, and that admission fee generally covers the cost of putting on the event – location rental, food, etc. Sponsorship income allows CNGA to make some additional net income, which helps us stay on the positive side of income for the year.
In other words, those sponsorship dollars make it possible for CNGA to deliver the content, resources, and other member benefits your organization provides.
CNGA is perhaps a bit different in that we generally only ask our members to sponsor events. Sometimes this is a great way to get new members, because other associated businesses are very interested in talking to you. We think that our members generally have the most relevant goods and services to offer our other members. Sponsoring an event helps you get your name out in front of members who may be new or haven’t met you yet. Being at the event with your name on the sponsorship list is a great conversation-starter. CNGA has sponsorship packages available. Or, you can sponsor activities individually. Thank you to all of you for being members, and for supporting CNGA in the many ways that you do!
