How Accounting Firms Can Evaluate Sponsorship Spend More Strategically

Written By: JoAnne Starks and Katie Renelt

As the year ramps up and teams move from one client deadline to the next, many accounting marketers find themselves fielding a steady stream of sponsorship and event requests. A charity gala. An industry conference. A trade show booth. An ad in an event program. A table at a fundraiser. Sponsorship requests have a way of arriving fast and rarely at a convenient time. Before your firm defaults to “yes,” it’s worth stepping back to evaluate which opportunities truly support growth and which ones simply add noise.

The bigger question is whether your firm has a thoughtful way to evaluate them, or whether the answer is simply “yes” because the request feels important in the moment.

For accounting firms, sponsorships can absolutely support growth. But they can also be among the hardest budget lines to measure and manage.

What counts as a sponsorship?

If you are an AAM member, the 2025-2026 AAM Marketing Budget Benchmark Study can be a great resource as a benchmark against what the fastest-growing firms are doing differently in terms of spending in this area. In this survey, Events and sponsorship-related spending fall into the “Conference and Events” category.

• Conferences and trade show expenses can include travel, attendance fees, exhibiting, trade show advertising, and sponsorships.
• Charitable sponsorships and events can include donations, sponsorships, tickets, and related costs tied to supporting charitable organizations or charitable events.

It is important to distinguish between a general sponsorship and sponsorship tied to a client relationship. In many firms, a sponsorship connected to a client or a specific business development effort may be treated differently from a pure marketing expense. That distinction matters. If the spend is tied to client service or client development, it may not hit the marketing budget in the same way.

That is especially relevant for firms with a strong nonprofit focus. Those firms may receive a high volume of charitable requests, and tracking whether a sponsorship is tied to a client relationship can be an important factor in deciding whether it belongs in the marketing budget or should be treated as a client-related expense.

Why firms struggle to assess sponsorships

One challenge is that many firms do not really decide which sponsorships to keep or cut. They repeat them.

Bob Silvy, Managing Director of Level Four Business Consulting, put it plainly: “Most firms don’t decide. They default.” Too often, the same events stay on the calendar because a partner supports them or because saying no feels uncomfortable.

Bob says the stronger approach is to reframe the decision. Instead of asking whether an event seems worthwhile, firms should ask whether it will help move a specific client or prospect relationship forward. That shift turns sponsorships from visibility expenses into business development investments.

Ralph MacNamara, Chief Growth Officer at Kaufman Rossin, sees the same need for discipline. His team uses ROI reporting to challenge assumptions and reallocate dollars when results are not there. As he says, “We use it as a tool to convince partners… we’ve done this for several years, and we’re not seeing results. Why don’t we take these dollars and do something else?”

That is not about proving marketing’s value in theory. It is about making better investment decisions.

What should firms ask before approving sponsorship spend?

The best approval questions are not complicated. They just force clarity.

Bob recommends firms ask:

• Who exactly are we trying to reach, and will they be there?
• What do we want to happen as a result?
• Who owns follow-up after the event?
• How will we measure success?

His point is an important one: many firms spend time evaluating the audience, visibility, and price, but very little time defining what happens after the event. If no one owns follow-up before the event, no one will own it after.

Ralph’s team asks similar questions, with an added layer of practicality. Is this the right audience? Do we have the right people participating? What comes with the sponsorship? Will there be speaking opportunities, attendee lists, or curated introductions? And what is the plan for follow-up?

He puts one test in especially simple terms: “If you don’t think it’s worth your time to attend, I don’t think it’s worth the firm’s dollars.”

Sponsorship does not always mean “write the check.”

One of the most helpful ideas for firms under budget pressure is that attendance and sponsorship are not the same thing.

Ralph shared that sometimes the best move is to attend first and sponsor later. In other words, let the firm test whether the audience, conversations, and opportunities are strong enough to justify a future investment. That approach can build a much stronger business case for including the sponsorship in next year’s budget.

His team is selective for a reason. “We’re turning down five or ten sponsorships for every one we approve,” Ralph said.

How should firms manage sponsorship spending?

Many firms still manage sponsorships one request at a time. A partner asks. A practice group supports it. Marketing coordinates the details. The result is often a scattered mix of events, uneven follow-up, and limited visibility into what is actually working. In this scenario, marketing is administrative not strategic.

Bob argues that firms get better results when marketing helps guide sponsorship decisions with a consistent framework and a portfolio view. That does not mean marketing controls every decision. It means marketing brings discipline, consistency, and better data to the discussion.

Ralph’s team has built that discipline over time. They started small, with marketing doing much of the tracking behind the scenes, then added support and accountability as the process matured. Their approach includes tracking attendees, capturing hard costs, linking participation to new business, and using CRM data to report on results over time.

As Ralph explained, “We’re tracking who comes by the booth… entering those names in our CRM… and then generating reports on how much we spent and how much new business we generated.”

What makes sponsorship ROI so hard to measure?

A recent LinkedIn poll we ran clearly shows the challenge. The biggest issue respondents cited was long sales cycles and hard attribution (42%), followed by disconnected data sources (25%), interactions not being captured (21%), and difficulty quantifying relationships (13%).

That aligns with what both Bob and Ralph see in practice. Firms often track what is easy to measure, such as attendance, scans, or booth traffic. The harder and more meaningful question is whether the event moved a relationship forward.

Bob’s view is that measurement problems often start much earlier than the reporting stage. If firms do not define success before signing the sponsorship, the data will never tell a useful story afterward.

A practical place to start in evaluating sponsorship spend

You do not need a perfect system to improve sponsorship decisions. Start with a few basics: define the target audience, set a clear objective, assign follow-up ownership, and track outcomes in your CRM.

Then look at the results honestly. Which sponsorships created meaningful conversations? Which ones led to meetings, pipeline, or stronger client relationships? Which ones did not?

That is how firms build credibility around sponsorship decisions over time.

For marketers who want to go deeper into this topic, Bob Silvy will speak at the AAM Summit on May 18, 2026, in his session, “Driving Sponsorship ROI and Firmwide Buy-In.” His session promises practical tools for turning sponsorships into measurable business development campaigns, along with ideas for helping partners see sponsorships as investments, not just expenses.

When time and attention are stretched, that may be exactly the conversation many firms need.