A sponsorship records what a sponsor organization bought or received, including the opportunity, amount, date, and benefits. You usually do not create sponsorships by hand. Rhythm creates one when a sponsorship opportunity order is paid, or when staff approve a purchase that was held for review. Staff can also enter a sponsorship directly when there is no order behind it.
How a Sponsorship Comes Into Existence
Rhythm creates sponsorships in two automatic ways, based on how you set up the opportunity:
- The opportunity does not require approval. When the sponsor's order is paid, Rhythm creates the sponsorship right away, with no action needed from your organization.
- The opportunity requires approval. The paid purchase stays on the sponsor's application for staff review instead of creating a sponsorship right away. Rhythm creates the sponsorship only after a staff member approves the request and activates it. Until then, the sponsor has paid, but no sponsorship record exists.
If one paid order includes several opportunities that all require approval on the same application, Rhythm can only keep the most recent order line on that application. Keep that in mind when more than one approval-required opportunity is bought at once, especially if staff later need to trace exactly which order paid for which opportunity.
Occasionally, the same paid-order notice reaches Rhythm twice, which can create a second sponsorship for one purchase. A display issue can also look like a duplicate, so compare the sponsor's page with the processed order or transaction record before you delete or refund anything.
In rare cases, Rhythm creates the order and sponsorship record successfully, but a separate step that marks the opportunity as sold fails on its own. When that happens, the opportunity is not marked sold, and the sponsorship may not appear in a Sponsorship & Benefit query, even though the order and the sponsor's company account show the purchase. Because the opportunity still looks available, a limited-quantity opportunity can be oversold. If a sponsorship you know was paid for does not appear in a query, check the opportunity's own sold count directly.
Processing a sponsorship application with Pay Later can, in some cases, create the order and invoice without creating the sponsorship record. The opportunity then still shows as available even though it was purchased. The same behavior has been observed when a Pay Later purchase is processed from the Portal. If you find a paid application with no matching sponsorship, contact Support. If an older paid order is affected this way, cancelling it and processing a new one in its place creates the missing sponsorship record and marks the opportunity sold.
What a New Sponsorship Copies from the Order
When Rhythm creates a sponsorship from an order, it fills in the sponsorship from the order and the application behind it:
- Sponsor organization. Rhythm usually uses the organization that placed the order. In the uncommon case where one order line ships to a different organization than the order itself, Rhythm records the sponsorship under that different organization, even though it creates the sponsor's own profile for the organization on the order.
- Contact. Rhythm uses the contact named on the application, the order line, or the order. If none of those records names a contact, the sponsorship has no contact. As Emails Sponsors Receive explains, no confirmation or activation email can go out without one.
- Quantity, amount, and date. Rhythm copies these directly from the order line and the order. Buying more than one of an opportunity does not multiply its benefits; the sponsorship still gets one copy of each benefit.
- Name. Rhythm builds the name from the opportunity's name and the sponsor's name when it creates the sponsorship. If you rename the opportunity or organization later, existing sponsorships keep the older name and do not update to match.
- Custom field values. Rhythm copies the sponsor's application answers from your Rhythm account's custom fields for applications onto the new sponsorship, as long as a sponsorship custom field with the same name exists to receive them. Rhythm copies only values on the application, not values entered directly on the opportunity or organization.
A sponsorship bought against a general opportunity that is linked to an event can be recorded with no category and a general type instead of an event type. If your reports group sponsorships by type, keep this in mind when a sponsorship you expected to see as an event sponsorship appears as general instead.
An order number entered directly on a sponsorship record appears in query results under Order Number, but it does not display on the sponsorship's own 360 page.
Naming, Ordering, and Cloning Opportunities
Wherever sponsorship opportunities are listed by name, such as on the Portal purchase page, Rhythm sorts them as text rather than by price. If you use a numeric prefix to control that order, a plain 1, 2, 3 can sort out of sequence once you pass 9. Leading zeros, such as 01, 02, 03, keep opportunities in the order you intend.
You can clone a sponsorship opportunity from its 360 page, under Opportunity Options › Clone This Opportunity. Cloning is also a way to offer a temporary discount when coupons do not fit. Clone the opportunity, give the clone a reduced price, and offer it for a limited time instead of applying a percentage-off coupon to the original. Special pricing rules on the original opportunity are another way to target a discount without cloning at all.
If a cloned opportunity's price looks wrong once it is for sale, check what it was cloned from. An opportunity cloned from an earlier complimentary, no-cost opportunity can carry over pricing setup you did not expect, so review the source record and its setup first.
Warning
Cloning an event with the option to copy its sponsorships also copies that event's sponsorship opportunities into the new event. If opportunities in a newly cloned event look duplicated, check whether they were carried over this way before assuming something went wrong.
Event Sponsor Lists
When a sponsorship names an event, Rhythm automatically adds the sponsor's organization to the event's sponsor list. The event then shows who is supporting it without anyone updating the event by hand. Each organization appears once per event, no matter how many separate sponsorships it has for that event. The entry keeps the date from whichever sponsorship reached the event first.
That listing does not stay perfectly in step with later changes. If you delete a sponsorship or move it to a different event, the organization's entry stays on the original event's sponsor list and is not removed or moved with the sponsorship. If the organization's name or logo changes later, the existing sponsor-list entry keeps the older name and logo instead of picking up the update.
When the Order Changes or Is Cancelled
Sponsorships stay in step with some order changes, but not all of them, and the difference matters:
- The order's details change. If you edit the order behind a sponsorship, Rhythm refreshes the copied order details on the matching sponsorships. This refresh only reaches the first page of an organization's sponsorships tied to that order, so an organization with a very large number of them may not have every sponsorship refreshed.
- The order is cancelled. If Rhythm created the sponsorship immediately when the order was first paid, cancelling the order removes that sponsorship, so it no longer appears on the organization's sponsorship views. If the sponsorship came from a purchase that was held for review and later approved by staff, cancelling the order does not remove it. The cancellation looks for a sponsorship tied to that order line and finds the application instead, so the sponsorship stays on the sponsor's record. Any refund from the cancellation is handled through Finance & Billing, separately from the sponsorship record, and appears there alongside the organization's other transactions.
Tip
If you expected an order cancellation to remove a sponsorship and the sponsorship is still there, check whether it came from a purchase that was originally held for approval. That is the one case where cancelling the order does not clean up the sponsorship for you, so you may need to remove or update it yourself.
Related Reading
A sponsorship almost always starts as an application. See Sponsorship Applications Explained for what an application records before it becomes a sponsorship. For what each sponsorship carries in benefits and how benefit expiry dates are set, see Sponsorship Benefits and Their Expiry Dates.