2023 WFEA Annual Conference

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Ukman to keynote 2023 fall conference in issaquah

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Lesa Ukman is why many of us are in the festival and event business.

When she founded IEG in 1982, it led corporate America to sponsor events like never before, and increasing the number of festivals and events by 10 times.

She’ll be the WFEA keynoter at the WFEA Conference October 8-11 in Issaquah – here’s your chance to learn about the latest in the sponsorship world.

Ukman has propelled sponsorship from a promotional sideline to a vital discipline by creating the methodology to value and measure investments in sports, arts, entertainment and nonprofits. Her analytics have been adopted throughout the world. Driven by the then-radical idea that businesses that partner with the things people love—sports, music, festivals and nonprofit causes—vastly outperform competitors, she founded IEG in 1982. Her ideas caught the imagination of the business world, giving rise to an industry now worth more than $85 billion. Lesa is an avid champion of the industry and a keen observer of sponsorship’s broader impact on society. This includes expanding the notion of ROI to incorporate social as well as financial outcomes. For over three decades she has piloted the annual IEG Conference, which remains a must-attend event for professionals seeking to make the most of their sponsorship relationships.

In May 2016, Lesa launched a new venture, Lesa Ukman Partnerships. Its first offering is the ProSocial Valuation Service® (prosocialvaluation.com), an innovative methodology to bring social capital into partnership valuation. This situates sponsorship relationships in our current dynamic environment—a marketplace in which purpose, passion and community are in high demand. Unlike ROI analytics, which calculate financial return for the sponsor, her new service will measure the social value generated by partnership activations.

Ukman is a thought-leading entrepreneur, writer and speaker renowned as a pioneer in assigning value to marketing collaborations.