When Joe Sampson left his job as executive director of One Spark, he had every intention of launching a couple of projects.
His new company was not one of them.
Sampson said he was inundated with opportunities to work with event organizers from New York to San Francisco to Dublin.
Those meetings helped reveal a huge gap in the event-planning business — assisting organizers with the business side and sustainability of the event and helping sponsors make better decisions about which events to support.
Dozens of calls and meetings later, he and Lisa Goodrich formed EventReal.
The new company will mean double duty for Goodrich, who will continue to serve as SouthEast Group’s director of marketing and community engagement.
Sampson and Goodrich say they complement each other well. He has experience in event management and operations, helping One Spark grow to more than 600 creators and 250,000 visitors its first two years.
Goodrich brings extensive fund development to the partnership and is well-known for events that have been held in the old Barnett Bank Building, owned by Steve Atkins, principal of SouthEast Group.
Many groups want to do events, Goodrich said, but it’s an “animal” most don’t understand.
They don’t know how to make an event profitable, efficient and sustainable. So each year, they can find themselves reinventing the wheel.
For sponsors, EventReal can guide them through the litany of requests they receive.
“They’re getting hammered every day,” Sampson said.
He said event sponsorship is a $50 billion industry worldwide. But many contracts are signed without data- or marketing-based decisions, he said.
Goodrich said sometimes sponsors want to support an event because of the market exposure. Other times it aligns with their mission or it’s an altruistic gift.
“We can help sponsors understand why they give and line them up with what meets their goals,” she said.
One of EventReal’s long-term goals is to launch what Sampson called an “automated event sponsorship marketplace.”
In simpler terms, he said, “Think of it as a match.com for event organizers and sponsors.”
He hopes to launch the effort next year.
Though the company is only a week old, Sampson said his calendar is filled with meetings and opportunities.
By this time next year, he’d like to be more than halfway toward having the marketplace built-out. And he’d like the company to have helped four to six big projects “become a lot more sustainable.”
Plus, Sampson said, he wants to work with “six to eight, maybe 10” groups that need help regardless of scale and scope.
“We’re coming across so many worthy projects, I’m going to find a way to work with them,” he said.
For more information on the company, visit eventreal.co.
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