Event planning and its 8 components
Today, we are going to go through the event planning components, briefly and superficially, so you know what you have to contemplate when creating your own. Understand this lesson as an explanation on why use the handout, cool?
If you read the booklet, you will see that there are 40+ pages talking about each part of the event planning, that is, what constitutes each one of them and how you can conduct it. It kind of follows the Business Administration school of thought, at least during what I remember from college.
Creating the concept of your event.
Starting with Concept.
The first thing when starting with your event planning is to work on what it represents. You may not have been able to go through this stage because the event was given to you as a task. What are its objectives, format and a basic study of the context in which it fits: competitors, date and, mainly, audience.
I like to create event concepts with internal and external objectives in mind. The intern is mine, that is, the only reason why your event will be successful. Why are you organizing this event?
The external objective is “why does the world need this event?”. You can replace the world with an audience, a customer, my boss, etc. The logic here is to justify the existence of your event to other people, now that you have the justification for you.
Working within the context of your event.
Let’s talk about the context: what situation does your event fit into?
The first question here is to know who your audience is. For sure, you already know who they are, but we need to elaborate further. In addition to demographics — age, gender, social class, where they are — we have to think about their behavior.
What are their aspirations, fears, desires, career, personal values, difficulties. When faced with a decision, what options do they choose and what weigh in their decision?
For example, for dinner. Your audience has the decision to eat at home, order from delivery that has free delivery or go to a hot dog stand on the corner of their block. For a more sophisticated audience, they may choose to go to a restaurant. And to other audiences, they don’t even think of dining out. This will help you decide on the next point.
Competitors: knowing your audience’s decision list, what will be happening on the same date as your event that can act as a substitute? For example, if your event is a play in December, it competes with other plays, cinema premieres, opening of restaurants or the opening of the Christmas Ferris wheel in the central square of the city.
Remember: you have to consider the date and what your audience may choose.
This reminds me of when I organized a career event for young university students. Its first edition was a huge success — I had taken all the precautions and done all the necessary studies, so much so that it worked.
In the second edition, the expectation was even greater. More sponsors, more marketing, more renowned speakers. Only the ticket sales wasn’t going well. We changed our strategy and it didn’t change. Then we learned, 2 weeks before the event, that on the same day the largest university party in the city was going to happen. As a result, we had a presence of 50% of the expected audience. Even I wanted to go to that party, actually. And I did, after my event.
All these tips are on my Event Toolbox course.
Is it relevant to also think about where my event will take place? Is it outdoors? This type of event needs a more formal setting, can it be in a pub, an auditorium, a park? These are all the initial considerations of your event.
Planning your event organizing team.
As a second point, we have the Team. The configuration of your team: how many people are there, what are their roles, what is their hierarchical relationship, if you have one. For smaller events, this part is more about dividing roles and setting goals; when you have larger teams, you organize subgroups.
I have already organized events for 500 people alone; events for 10,000 people with 5 or 6 people full time; events for 300 people with 40 volunteers. So, it really changes. There is no model for the organization chart of events that suits everyone. You will probably develop on the basis of error and success and, mainly, agreements that must be made at the beginning of team building.
The handout comments a little more on organization chart, recruitment, internal communication, these things.
Structuring your budget.
The next point in the event planning is the Budget: revenues and costs. This part is the one that many of my students have difficulty in even starting or doing in any way, which makes them score very poorly in the item Cohesion of the Plan in the TARGET framework.
The traditional way of thinking about budgeting is to put the pessimistic, realistic and optimistic views, in which you start in an unfavorable revenue scenario for your event and “go up” as revenue stream improves.
Here is what happens: nobody starts the event thinking about the Pessimistic scenario. When they don’t start with the Optimist, they go to the Realistic; and they only think about cutting costs when they realize that not so much money is coming in, which is terrible, because now you’ve already spent on things that you wouldn’t spend if you knew in the beginning how much you would have made.
So, I like to think about it as a chain of processes and prioritization. We will talk about this in a future lesson. Hold your horses there.
Defining the content and agenda of your event.
As the next point in our event planning, we have the Agenda. In this item, you will describe everything that happens in the event, related to its content, displacement of people and materials. It is an activity that is managed by the Agenda role of your event, but also coordinated in conjunction with the Logistics role.
If your event has blocks of actual content, for example, opening, lecture 1, workshop, coffee break, grand lecture, closing, this planning is much more content-absorbing. How your audience will assimilate the content.
If your event involves commuting activities, you have to plan commuting time, preparation of rooms or spaces, delays, cool?
If your event is a big session, like a fair, the role of Logistics gains dominance over the event’s agenda to coordinate activities, replacement of materials, problem-solving, such as electricity, food or even lack of water at the event. What, right….
The agenda has as strong role to provide to your audience an incredible experience, as well as not ruining it; when poorly formatted or poorly prepared, your team will suffer from even minor incidents. For this reason, logistics and agenda are included in the item Eventualities within the TARGET framework.
Production and logistics — essential in every event planning.
Within the Production topic, I will talk about logistics, as well as timetable.
The event producer is the organizer of the event itself. Not surprisingly, they are also usually the project manager.
The role of the producer is to ensure that the event happens on the defined terms, what we consider the event itself, the day. Therefore, all planning topics are administrative mechanisms to make the event work, both as an object and as a product. And the role of the producer is to deliver this product.
The production of the event varies in a myriad of ways. Especially according to the type of event you are organizing and the format of your team, so in the handout I give some general topics that you will want to investigate and also about checklists. It is super important that we work with checklists all the time.
Since I started working with these lists, my world has improved a lot. Essentially, you draw up a list of everything that goes along with that topic and mark it as tasks are getting done, like checkboxes.
As the events go by, you improve your checklists and this creates a self-management system. Your team will be able to execute the event by themselves. As you get better in provide better job descriptions, you will also improve at managing your event.
The checklist brings you clarity, predictability and reproducibility of your operation. We’ll talk more about that in the next lesson.
Setting deadlines and tasks: the timetable.
Another thing within the responsibility of the event producer is the management of the timetable. We have a lesson just dedicated to that, don’t miss it. The producer’s responsibility is to set up the schedule and follow it, mainly so that the event is delivered on the agreed date.
You must, if you are the producer or manager of the event, have a minimal understanding of project management, to ensure a nice flow of information and coordination between your team, cool?
The most traditional project schedule is the Gantt chart, but there are several others. You can have the visualization using kanban, macros and network diagram, for example.
Giving general guidelines, the producer will also be responsible for working with the layout of the space and ensuring that the event suits, from the point of view of the participants’ experience, the expected delivery of the proposed service, security and legal demands involved, such as emergency exit, flow of people and signs.
Promoting and publicizing the event with marketing.
As the penultimate topic, we have Marketing. Here it may be a simple exercise, as your goal is to get participants to your event. When I am hiring a marketing professional for my event, I like to say that he or she is responsible for ensuring the presence of people, because that would also involve convincing them to go, not only signing up.
The main role is to understand your audience, where they are, how they consume content and try to target content and advertising to that audience, with the intention of convincing them to pay and / or attend your event.
The post-event: what happens next.
As a last topic, but no less important, but often left out, we have the Post-event, that is, what happens after your event. This varies a lot according to your objective, as we can have completely different arrangements of actions.
Here is what happens: for an event that aims to sell a product or service, you will want to entice your audience to buy. For internal HR training, it can be ensuring that the quality of the team’s work improves. For a customer update event, you will want them to use certain features of your product.
Your role in the post-event is to ensure the achievement of the objectives of your event. Specially if your goals have to be measured post-event, and also to organize your life after the event, whether with debriefing, payment of suppliers, internal and external reports , and the like.
The important thing is not to forget the event after it is over. In most cases, you can expand or refine the achievement of your goals with simple actions — think, the “worst” is over, or the heaviest has happened, which is the event. Now, you have to make sure that the harvest of its laurels is even bigger. As we say in my hometown: better than that, just twice that.
The article’s treasure:
In the end of each article, I will write a final recap for you to memorize the main takeaways.
This is what I presented in this article:
- The important thing is not to forget the event after it is over. In most cases, you can expand or refine the achievement of your goals with simple actions — think, the “worst” is over, or the heaviest has happened, which is the event. Now, you have to make sure that the harvest of its laurels is even bigger. As we say in my hometown: better than that, just twice that.
- We saw about every aspect of event planning, from its concept, to team, schedule, production, marketing, finance, until the post-event. Everything we saw here is in the handout, be sure to download it.
- My intention was to recap what makes up a plan. Remembering that the bulk of the event is in production, all the rest are administrative devices to make your event work and also for it to not to go wrong.
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Always look both ways. See you in the future.
