Event Planning is the most important part of your event from an experience point of view as well as from a budget and revenue vantage point. The more detailed an event organizer can get about planning out events, the more streamline the event will be. Here are a few tips and tricks for planning an event.
Pre-event planning is important, the biggest mistake new organizers make is on-boarding an event team too soon. If you are paying your event team by time, this could have a huge impact on your budget. Make sure to take a look at each category of the event in terms of account management, production of the planning, production of the event, creative for the event and try to include sponsorship or revenue stream outside of relying on ticket sales. If there is an opportunity to start with a budget generated by the event, this will help immensely in a break even strategy. Take a look at your pre-event timeline and determine when to do a kick-off for the core team, then once that team is on-boarded, make sure to get input on when to pull in the larger event production team. Getting expert opinions from your team will help you gut check your own anxiety around planning the event and not overspending or on-boarding staff too late.
A creative look and feel as well as a marketing campaign is often key in gaining attendance and buzz about the event. Determine what event staff could be tasked with managing social media for the event and add this as a role and responsibility to the existing team as opposed to hiring an outside person to solely concentrate on social media. Put the social media strategy on a timeline that posts several times a week. Once the creative deliverables are complete a simple copy and past is all that’s needed a few times a day, a week or whatever is deemed as appropriate for the type of event and demographic your event will reach.
Gage trends before spending money on your event. Current trends are moving away from big showy displays of money and moving into a phase that requires more authenticity and transparency. This is extremely helpful to budgets! Assume your attendees are smart, they will see through any type of mask that is put up.
Offer attendee post-event engagement. You’ve done all the work to gather these attendees, it’s worth holding on to the engagement! Plan ways to incentivize the attendees to stay engaged or give them access to premiere information that they will want and in turn gives attendees the opportunity to continue to check back in with the event website or social media channels.
Planning is important and so is the day(s) of the event! Once events are executed the biggest mistake is for the team to not set aside a debrief. What could have been done better, suggestions for the next event and congratulate one another on what worked for the event. This step proves to be invaluable in the event organizer world. Happy planning friends, make LOTS of Plans!