Providing Marketing Funds to your partners

Who is this for? This will be useful to you if you are a company on PartnerStack looking to provide Marketing Funds to your partners.

Marketing Funds overview

Marketing Funds also known as Market Development Funds or MDFs are funds you can provide your partners to help them promote and sell your product or services in a particular market or geographic region.

Marketing Funds support the development of marketing and sales activities that generate demand for your offerings. Providing Marketing Funds can strengthen your relationships with your partners by providing them financial support in their initiatives promoting your company. 

Approved Marketing Funds can be paid to your partners by creating a manual commission for your partner (subject to regular fees and payout schedule) or paid externally. 

Who can create a Marketing Fund?

Marketing Fund creation is available to all companies on PartnerStack. This feature can be found under the Enablement section of your left-hand menu in the Marketing Funds tab.

You can create a Marketing Fund for your partners so long as your teammate permission level covers the partner you are creating the fund for. 

If you have restricted group access, you will be able to create Marketing Funds only for the partners in your assigned groups. If you have restricted access and need to create a fund for a particular partner, reach out to your teammate who has access to the intended partner.

Creating a Marketing Fund

You can create multiple different Marketing Funds following the steps below. Each Marketing Fund can be assigned to multiple partners, and each partner can be assigned to multiple Marketing Funds. 

1. Log into your PartnerStack dashboard here
2. Click on the Marketing Funds tab under the Enablement section in your left-hand menu
3. Click on "Create a Marketing Fund"
4. In the Description & Schedule step give your fund:
   1. a name i.e. "Referral Funds 2023 - VIP Partners"
   2. a description that will be visible to partners and help them understand how to qualify for the fund
   3. a schedule to define when partners are eligible to submit fund requests
      Note: The fund end date is optional
      
5. Click "Start building"
6.  In the Audience step select which individual partners will be eligible to submit requests for this Marketing Fund. 
   
7. Click "Save & Continue"
8. Select how your Marketing Fund will be managed: "Unlimited budget" or "Limited budget"
   
   1. If selecting an unlimited budget, enter your desired currency 
   2. If selecting a limited budget, enter your desired currency, select if you want to provide the "Same budget for all partners" or provide an "Individual budget per partner" and add the budget amount
      
9. Click "Save and Continue"
10. In the request form step, you can define any additional guidelines you want partners to see when submitting their Marketing Fund request
    
11. Once you have added your additional guidelines and configured your form fields to your liking, click "Activate Marketing Fund"

On the start date of your fund, partners will be sent an email informing that a Marketing Fund is available to them. This email includes the Marketing fund description you enter when creating your fund. This email cannot be customized. 

Reviewing and approving Marketing Fund requests

Marketing Funds may or may not have a defined budget.

Unlimited marketing funds will allow any eligible partner to submit any amount of requests. Marketing funds with limited budgets will allow eligible partners to submit requests up until they reach their determined budget.

A partner can submit multiple fund requests under one Marketing Fund so long as their request total does not exceed their assigned budget if applicable. 

Once one or more partners have submitted a Marketing Fund request - it's time to review!

1. Log into your PartnerStack dashboard here
2. Click on the Marketing Funds tab under the Enablement section in your left-hand menu
3. In the "Fund requests" section click on the request you would like to review to open the Marketing Fund detail page view
   1. In the detail page view, you will be able to review who requested the fund, and the partner's answers to your fund form fields
4. Click "Approve or decline"
5. Select Approve or Decline. If declining the request, enter a reason for the partner
6. Click "Approve request" or  "Decline request"

Once you have approved a request you will need to determine how you would like to pay the partner. This does not automatically occur when a request is approved. 

Marketing funds are not automatically paid out when approved.

You can pay a partner's approved Marketing Fund by:

• Creating a manual commission for your partner in your PartnerStack dashboard. Please note, that manual commissions are subject to the regular payout fees and follow your regular payment schedule.
• Sending the fund payment to your partner externally to PartnerStack

Marketing Fund statuses

Your Marketing Fund can have one of four statuses:

If there are no pending requests, you can manually end a fund before its scheduled end date, however once ended, a fund cannot be reactivated and must be recreated.

Once a Marketing Fund has ended, requests can no longer be actioned. If you have included an end date for your fund, ensure you are reviewing all requests before the fund end date. 

Marketing Fund request statuses

Requests submitted by your partners can have one of three statuses:

Approving or declining a partner's request cannot be undone. If a request is accidentally declined, reach out to your partner and request that they resubmit their request. 

The partner Marketing Funds experience

Partners will receive automated emails when a Marketing Fund is made available to them, you will receive an email when a partner has submitted a request and the partner will receive another email when their request has been approved or declined. 

Partners will only see the "Marketing Funds" tab in their partnership if an Active or Ended Marketing Fund exists for them. 

For more information on how partners interact with Marketing Funds see our partner-facing support guide: Requesting Marketing Funds from a company.