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The Sponsorship Board Fit Scorecard

Is your audience ready for a live sponsorship board?

Five questions to decide whether to pilot now, prove demand first, or wait. For newsletters, podcasts, professional communities, directories, events, nonprofits, and businesses.

A board cannot create an audience, invent sponsors, or guarantee revenue. It makes paid placement self-serve once the demand exists. Four things decide whether yours is ready:

  1. whether your audience is commercially coherent;
  2. whether plausible sponsors exist;
  3. whether the inventory belongs in a self-serve board;
  4. whether you can launch it without damaging trust.

You do not need OnTheList.Live to use the result. It is scored in your browser and shown immediately — no email required to see it.

How to score

Audience size scores 0, 1 or 2 by band. Each statement scores:

0
No / unknown
1
Partly / inconsistent
2
Yes / evidenced

Use evidence from the last 90 days where possible. A flattering guess earns zero.

Five questions

Followers, subscribers or members on the channel the board would sit against — your largest one. A thousand people who come back is the floor; five thousand is where a sponsor can be named.

2. My audience comes back on a schedule they can predict.

A newsletter issue, a podcast episode, a regular community post, an event date, or steady traffic to a directory.

3. I can name five likely sponsors right now.Caps your band

Answer “No / unknown” here and your result cannot be Ready to Pilot, however high your total is.

4. I have one standard paid spot I can sell without building something custom each time.Caps your band

A labelled listing with a link counts. A host-read shout-out you negotiate every time does not.

Answer “No / unknown” here and the spot is not defined yet, so your result cannot be Ready to Pilot.

5. I will label every paid listing as an ad, and say that a higher spot is not an endorsement.Caps your band

Answer “No / unknown” here and the advice is simple: do not run a paid board. Your result cannot be Ready to Pilot.

Eligibility

These two are not scored. They stop a paid board no matter what your total is, so we ask them on their own.

My category is none of these: illegal, unsafe, deceptive, adult, gambling, or otherwise prohibited.Stops a ranking
I am a U.S. host, I get paid in U.S. dollars, and I take card payments.Stops a ranking

Right now OnTheList.Live supports only this combination. A “no” says nothing about your board idea.

Scored in your browser. Nothing is sent unless you ask for it below.