Cultural Sponsorship and Entrepreneurial Mistrust

Abstract

Company sponsorships are a way to fund cultural management, allowing cultural organizers to be independent, especially in those countries where this sector is supported mainly by public funds. This chapter discusses the results of a survey the author conducted in Rome, Italy. Theoretically, in this city with a great cultural heritage, there are many opportunities of sponsorships both for companies looking for good tools of communication (i.e. for tourism targets) and for cultural managers asking for money to carry out better work and to make long term plans. Using a questionnaire of 20 closed questions, in a face-to-face way, the author asked 345 firms how, when and where they have been working with sponsorship tools. The main result of the survey indicates that there is often a problem of communication between these two different worlds: the cultural sector and commercial firms.

Key Terms in this Chapter

Relationship: Doing connections among people to do business and social development.

Networking: Building relationships among all levels of stakeholders.

Communication: Set of ways to put in contact someone who wants to give something to some other that probably are searching or that it could do it.

Sponsorship: A marketing tool to reach audience by activities or brand by others.

Marketing: Management disciplines for knowing the market, for doing strategies to entry in it, for mixing tools like communication, placement, pricing, packaging.

Fundraising: How designing social value of an institution or cultural products and selling to others that wants to acquire them.