{"id":15821,"date":"2016-11-16T18:18:17","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T23:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=15821"},"modified":"2016-11-16T18:18:17","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T23:18:17","slug":"sports-sponsorships-could-be-found-without-consultants-help-council","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/sports-sponsorships-could-be-found-without-consultants-help-council\/","title":{"rendered":"Sports sponsorships could be found without consultants\u2019 help: Council"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aurora\u2019s arenas and pools now boast the names of Highland Automotive, Aurora Toyota, Canadian Tire, and Pfaff, to name but a few companies that have recently purchased the naming rights to municipal facilities \u2013 but further sponsorship opportunities must be found by in-house staff, according to Council.
\nCouncil last week rejected an item from the 2017 Capital Budget which would have earmarked $90,000 to hire a consultant to look at ways of identifying facility opportunities and sponsorships around the Town of Aurora.
\nLast year, Councillor Jeff Thom, who works in the sports advertising business, put forward a suggestion that sponsorship opportunities and facility advertising should be the subject of a review. But Councillors \u2013 including Councillor Thom \u2013 balked at the price tag floated around the table.
\n\u201cIt has to do with available manpower in order to look at additional sponsorship opportunities and explore those more fully,\u201d said Al Downey, Aurora\u2019s Director of Parks and Recreation, responding to Councillor Thom\u2019s request that he put more \u201cmeat on the bones\u201d of that $90k. \u201cPresently we have a part time person who deals with sponsorship and their main goal is to go out and obtain as much sponsorship as possible. To redeploy them and staff to look at a new strategy and explore other opportunities, compare ourselves with best practices of other municipalities, we feel that we are going to need some additional manpower to do that. We felt that was best done on a short term basis through a consultant as opposed to bringing on additional staff to address that.\u201d
\nAlthough Councillor Thom conceded there might be some \u201cmanpower issues\u201d in the Parks and Rec department, he said all a consultant is going to come back and say is \u201cyou just need to sell more\u201d \u2013 a conclusion that shouldn\u2019t cost nearly $100,000.
\n\u201cI think we can handle this in-house,\u201d he said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to happen overnight. I think putting a strategy together takes time. It doesn\u2019t have to take all of your department\u2019s time or all that part time staff\u2019s time, but we have a lot of smart people in staff, we have a lot of smart people around the Council table. We can come up with a strategy for advertising in-house that uses current resources and we don\u2019t need to spend $90,000 to do that.
\n\u201cI brought this forward and would like to see us have a renewed strategy, so I am not trying to stop the idea from moving forward. I just think we have the smarts and the abilities within staff without spending $90,000 on a consultant.\u201d
\nThis was the general feeling expressed by Councillors, who said a strategy was moving in the right direction but there are other paths, including bringing together community volunteers, to identify further opportunities.
\n\u201cSponsorship is a topic we should be delving into, but I am a little hesitant to go to a consultant at this point in time and spend the $90,000 because I am not convinced that they are going to point us in any direction that we can\u2019t find on our own,\u201d said Councillor Michael Thompson. \u201cIf it is a question of staff resources and redeployment, then I think we have to look at if we\u2019re doing the right things and if it is better to utilize some of our staff to pursue this as opposed to some other things. I would like to understand more of the challenges of why we don\u2019t think we can achieve it internally.\u201d
\nResponding to Council concerns, Mr. Downey said he and staff felt there was a degree of \u201curgency\u201d to bring a sponsorship strategy forward, but now that urgency did not seem to be there. Replying to a question from Mayor Geoff Dawe on how a $90,000 spend would compare to revenue brought in, Mr. Downey said he expected there would be a profit, but time is an issue.
\nIf done in-house, it could be 2018 before a strategy is presented, he concluded.
\n\u201cI would prefer to get someone in a position and have them sell,\u201d offered Councillor Tom Mrakas as an alternative to a consultant. \u201cWhen it comes to this, I don\u2019t think a consultant is going to tell us anything we don\u2019t know. We couldn\u2019t put someone in a position to sell that wouldn\u2019t do on their own. Go out and sell it. What we need is a couple of good sales people to get the advertisements\u2026and for me I would prefer to spend that $90,000 in a staff position and have them do the work instead of getting a consultant [who will end up telling us] we need to hire someone.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aurora\u2019s arenas and pools now boast the names of Highland Automotive, Aurora Toyota, Canadian Tire, and Pfaff, to name but a few companies that have recently purchased the naming rights to municipal facilities \u2013 but further sponsorship opportunities must be found by in-house staff, according to Council. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-47b","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-01 07:01:56","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}