Sponsors can now pay you directly

Registration became digital a long time ago. Sponsorship payments, surprisingly, often did not.

A sponsor chooses a package, confirms the details, and then the process leaves the event platform. An invoice is created somewhere else. Payment is tracked somewhere else. Someone updates a spreadsheet. Someone else checks the bank account. Eventually, the sponsorship record is marked paid.

For one of the most important revenue streams at an event, there can still be a remarkable amount of manual work between “we’ll take it” and “paid.”

Today, that changes.

Sponsorship payments are now live in Event Passport PRO.

Sponsors can reserve a package and pay through your own Stripe account, directly within the sponsorship workflow.

No separate payment form. No manually matching a transaction to a sponsor. No moving between systems just to find out whether a sponsorship has actually been paid.

And Event Passport PRO’s fee is $0.99 plus 1.5% of the pre-tax sponsorship amount, with the percentage capped at $25 per transaction.*

From reservation to paid in one continuous flow.

Sponsorship is core event revenue

It is easy to think of sponsorship as an additional revenue stream around an event. For many B2B events, it is much more significant than that.

Informa, one of the world’s largest B2B event operators, reported £3.0 billion in B2B Live Events revenue in 2025. Of that, approximately £2.25 billion came from sponsorship and exhibitors—nearly 75% of the total.

The proportion varies considerably by event model. Informa Markets, its transaction-led events business, generated 88% of revenue from sponsors and exhibitors. The equivalent figures were 49% for its content-led Informa Connect events and 50% for Informa Festivals.

Those figures are specific to Informa rather than an industry-wide benchmark, but they illustrate something important: for major B2B events, the companies buying booths, packages and sponsorship opportunities can represent a substantial share of the economics of the event.

When that much of an event’s commercial activity can come from sponsors and exhibitors, the infrastructure around collecting that revenue deserves the same attention as ticketing.

That is what this release is about.

You decide when sponsors pay

Not every sponsorship should be purchased like a ticket.

For some events, immediate payment makes perfect sense. Inventory is limited, packages are sold first come, first served, and a booth should not remain unavailable indefinitely while an organizer waits for payment.

For others, the relationship works differently. A sponsor may be a long-standing member, a major partner or a large organization whose finance team needs an invoice, a purchase order or an internal approval before funds can move.

Event Passport PRO supports both models.

Collect at reservation. The sponsor chooses a package, completes the reservation and pays before the sponsorship is secured.

Collect later through the sponsor portal. The sponsor reserves first, and payment becomes part of the sponsor workflow afterwards, alongside the other requirements and deadlines associated with their package.

You choose the payment timing for the Experience, and that setting applies consistently across your sponsorship program.

The technology adapts to the commercial relationship rather than forcing every sponsorship through the same purchasing process.

Sponsors choose how they pay

Once you decide when payment is required, sponsors can use the payment method that works for their organization.

Card through secure checkout. The sponsor completes payment through Stripe. Confirmation is immediate, and the payment is automatically associated with the sponsorship.

Hosted invoice. For sponsors that need to involve accounts payable, the payment can follow an invoice workflow instead.

This distinction matters more with sponsorships than it does with ordinary ticket purchases.

A smaller package may be an easy corporate-card transaction. A larger exhibition or presenting sponsorship may have to move through procurement and finance before it can be paid.

Both now belong to the same sponsorship record.

The payment method can change. The underlying workflow does not.

A fee designed for larger transactions

Sponsorship transactions are also very different from ticket transactions in value.

That shaped how we priced them.

Event Passport PRO charges:

$0.99 plus 1.5% of the pre-tax sponsorship amount, with the percentage capped at $25 per transaction.

The fee comes out of the organizer’s payout rather than being added to the sponsor’s purchase.

If you agreed to sell a sponsorship for $2,000, the sponsor still sees a $2,000 sponsorship.

Here is what the Event Passport PRO fee looks like at different transaction sizes:

$450 sponsorship → $7.74 fee (Effective rate: 1.7%)

$800 sponsorship → $12.99 fee (Effective rate: 1.6%)

$2,000 sponsorship → $25.99 fee (Effective rate: 1.3%)

$3,500 sponsorship → $25.99 fee (Effective rate: 0.74%)

$10,000 sponsorship → $25.99 fee (Effective rate: 0.26%)

The percentage component reaches its $25 maximum at approximately $1,667.

After that, the Event Passport PRO fee does not increase.

A $3,500 sponsorship carries a $25.99 Event Passport PRO fee.

A $10,000 sponsorship carries a $25.99 fee. A $35,000 sponsorship does too.

The reason is straightforward: an uncapped percentage that may be reasonable for a ticket becomes increasingly difficult to justify as transaction values move into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

We wanted the economics to work differently for sponsorships.

* Card and invoice processing is handled by Stripe at Stripe’s applicable processing rates and is paid to Stripe. The amounts above represent Event Passport PRO’s fee.

The payment becomes part of the sponsorship

The larger improvement is not simply that Event Passport PRO can process the transaction.

It is that the transaction now belongs to the sponsorship.

When payment succeeds, the sponsorship record is updated automatically. The reservation is confirmed, inventory reflects the sale, and the organizer can see its payment status without reconciling another system.

You can also see the numbers behind the payout: the sponsorship total, processing costs, Event Passport PRO’s fee and the resulting net amount.

That information remains attached to the transaction.

The commercial record is preserved as well. If you change the package price later, an existing sponsor keeps the price agreed when the reservation was made.

That means the sponsor record, payment and historical terms continue to agree long after the event is over.

Online payments are optional

There are also perfectly good reasons not to move sponsorship payments into an event platform.

Some organizations already have established invoicing and accounts-receivable processes. Others need sponsorship revenue to flow through an association management system, accounting platform or centralized finance department.

Those workflows can remain exactly where they are.

Online sponsorship payments in Event Passport PRO are opt-in.

You can continue managing packages, sponsors, deliverables and assets in Event Passport PRO while handling the financial transaction externally.

Or you can bring payment into the same workflow and allow Event Passport PRO to connect the reservation, transaction and sponsor record automatically.

Existing sponsorships are unaffected, and nothing changes until you enable online payments.

One sponsorship, one continuous record

Payments complete something we have been building toward with sponsorship management in Event Passport PRO.

An organizer can create the packages they actually sell, including pricing, inventory, member and non-member rates, add-ons and custom questions.

A sponsor can see what is available and reserve online.

They can now pay immediately or according to the payment process you establish.

After the sale, their sponsor portal becomes the place to upload logos, complete their listing, accept terms, submit documents and see what is still required before the event.

The organizer sees the other side of that same process from the dashboard.

Package → reservation → payment → onboarding → fulfillment.

It is one commercial relationship and, increasingly, one continuous record.

Turning payments on

Sponsorship payments are included with Event Passport PRO at no additional subscription cost. Transaction fees apply only when an online payment is collected.

A connected Stripe account is required. If you already use Event Passport PRO to collect ticket payments, the same Stripe account can be used for sponsorships.

Open any Experience and go to Sponsors.

From there, choose when sponsors should pay and which payment methods you want to make available.

Then publish your reservation page. Sponsors can take it from there.

Here’s to simpler sponsorships!