At SMX Boston, ZipSprout brought local sponsorship link building off the slide deck and into the conference hall.
We featured five Boston-based nonprofits and community organizations so attendees could see the kinds of sponsorship opportunities brands can support through ZipSprout: local groups doing visible, meaningful work in their communities.
This is more important than ever.
Nonprofits face more demand and less predictable funding. Meanwhile, small businesses and agencies are also looking for credible ways to stand out across search, local communities, and AI-generated answers.
Local sponsorships connect those needs.
They give nonprofits and community organizations another path to support, while giving brands a way to build visibility through genuine local participation.
So at SMX Boston, attendees helped ZipSprout decide where to send $5,000 in donations.
The road to $5,000 in donations to Boston Nonprofits
Before SMX Boston, ZipSprout selected five Boston-based organizations from our network of more than 160,000 local sponsorship opportunities.
Each organization represented the kind of local partner brands and agencies can support through ZipSprout (nonprofits, community programs, local arts organizations, and public-service groups doing meaningful work in their communities).
These were the nonprofits we chose:
- Boston Fire Department Relief Fund
- Brookline Symphony Orchestra
- 2nd Act
- Aaron’s Presents
- Youth Advocacy Foundation
Before the event, we reached out to each organization to confirm that we could feature them at our booth. At SMX, attendees stopped by, reviewed the featured organizations, and voted for the organization they wanted to support.
After the event, we tallied the votes and used the results to allocate $5,000 among the five organizations.
Here were the results:
| Organization | Donation |
|---|---|
| Boston Fire Department Relief Fund | $1,300 |
| Brookline Symphony Orchestra | $250 |
| 2nd Act | $600 |
| Aaron’s Presents | $250 |
| Youth Advocacy Foundation | $2,600 |
| Total | $5,000 |
And we hit our goal!!!
Thank you to everyone who stopped by the ZipSprout booth, learned more about these organizations, and helped direct support to Boston nonprofits!!!
Sponsorship links belong in the search conversation
Search visibility continues to expand beyond the pages a brand controls.
Buyers still find businesses through Google, but they also encounter brands through AI answers, local mentions, third-party pages, community sites, directories, associations, events, and nonprofit partners.
These external signals shape how customers find brands.
One often overlooked factor: local sponsorships.
When a business sponsors a nonprofit, event, school, association, or community organization, you get more than a backlink. You can create a public record of real participation in the communities you serve.
For small businesses, that creates visibility beyond their own website. For agencies, it gives clients a practical way to build local relevance. For nonprofits and community organizations, it creates support from brands that want to participate in the places they serve.
The broader visibility conversation at SMX Boston
The donation campaign showed the local sponsorship side of a broader search visibility conversation at SMX Boston.
More businesses are concerned with visibility now that Google and AI tools send less traffic to websites.
Businesses need to know whether they appear in AI answers and which surfaces they need to focus on to influence those answers.
That’s what our team (Xofu, Citation Labs, and ZipSprout) was on the ground to discuss:
- Xofu helps teams track where brands appear in AI buyer prompts and which sources shape those answers.
- Citation Labs helps brands improve the content, links, and citations that support visibility.
- ZipSprout focuses on one practical part of that source ecosystem: sponsorship links from nonprofits, events, associations, and community organizations.
Search visibility is increasingly shaped by sources beyond a brand’s own website. Sponsorship links are one practical way to build more of those sources.
Our team connected the dots in their presentations on stage at SMX:
Garrett French, CEO and Founder, spoke about how 15 years of link building prepared him for AI search.
James Wirth, Managing Director, Product & Growth, discussed AI answer tracking wins and woes, what teams should measure, and how to avoid false wins.
See ZipSprout at BrightonSEO in San Diego
SMX Boston showed how a conference booth could make local sponsorships tangible.
Attendees learned about real community organizations, chose the ones they wanted to support, and helped direct ZipSprout’s donation.
We’re bringing the same idea to BrightonSEO in San Diego.
You’ll find ZipSprout at the Citation Labs booth, along with the giant ZipSprout donation thermometer. Stop by, learn about the featured nonprofits, and vote for the organization you’d like us to support.
Local sponsorships work best when they connect real businesses with real organizations doing meaningful work.
We’d love your help deciding where the next donation goes.
