How to plan an event and make it successful?
To start on how to plan an event, we have first to define what’s success, how about that? Success is a very generic term and it changes depending on the context, so there is no way I can give you a recipe. You will need to define what success is for you.
For a salesperson, a successful event can be a lecture that turns many participants into buyers. In HR, when employees leave better prepared or more motivated by the event. For marketing, it can be that livestream that captures as many leads as possible. For a business owner, this is when the event promotes their brand. We have to take this into account before discussing how to plan an event.
Don’t forget to read our first topic, where we defined what an event is.
First things to know on how to plan an event.
Success, when I was an intern and was organizing my very first event in which the director would be present, was simply not making mistakes.
Anyway, if you want to learn how to plan an event to be successful, you have to know it will be entirely defined by the objective you have. I don’t get tired of talking about this and I harp on the same string.
So, before you plan your event, start thinking about what success is for you and / or your company. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re never going to get there.
Let’s draw the big picture here:
Events are an object of study for their capacity to trigger change and unlock processes. When we talk about making a successful event, studies fall into the field of project management, which makes sense. There’s a lot of content to be drawn here to make it happen.
One of the main factors for considering an event successful or not it the “experience”. There’s this research that puts its as the most critical aspect for an event success, published in a book called Strategic Event Creation. So, the event design is a great predictor of whether the attendees are going to have a high quality experience or not, therefore is where you should put your efforts in.
Maybe we can further imply that the responsibility of a event producer is to focus on its plan and management.
There is also this study, titled “From visitor journey to event design” where they put into the perspective of the attendee — they are the ones who will define as event as successful or not, therefore we should focus on their experience and planning and managing their journey touch points — or points of interaction with our events. “The experience can create emotions for attendees, e.g. enthusiasm or aversion, leading to attendees concluding that the event had been successful”.
In contrast, the study Events Design and Experience is more direct suggesting that event success comes from logistics, planning and management. As we mentioned, equating event management to any other project management.
Awesome. That’s why I said it all depends on which perspective you’re going to use to define success for you and your team.
What are the components of a successful event?
With my 10-year experience, I have identified six areas that greatly increase the chance that an event will succeed. They cover many areas of event planning, but there are a few extra things.
They are: Team, Audience, Revenue & Costs, Goals, Eventualities, Timetable. These six areas, if well planned and thought out, will make your event have an incredible chance of success. We will cover more of them in the next lesson. Better than that, just twice that.
You will find more about these six areas in my short course called Event Toolbox.
Assembling a successful team for your event.
I’m going to talk about Team and Target today. In the next lesson, I will talk about the other areas.
I thought of this strategy to make you watch more videos.
Team. You need to have the right people in the boat who know where to row to, if that makes sense. There are also many people who organize events alone or only with one more person. Okay, we’re all in the same boat. Been there, done that. I have spent many nights preparing welcome kits and putting cord through the badges.
Here is what happens: it turns out that here you need to know which functions you are taking and at which times. There are six roles within the organization of events in general: project manager, logistics, agenda, infrastructure, communication, sales and finance. Whether you are alone or with others, it is important to know that these roles may be present.
The point here is to know the purpose of each role in your event and how to plan en event accordingly, to know how each of them contributes to the overall success of the event.
If you don’t know what is a polymath, you may want to read more about it to balance out the skills in your team.
Get to know the roles in event organization:
As a manager, you will be responsible for the project. He or she is the one who guarantees that your event will go well and that it will not go wrong. We will talk about that soon. They are responsible for ensuring that people have all the information — because of that, they often end up being the leader, but it is not mandatory. I was a project manager myself, but I wasn’t in the lead.
Communication, sales and finance are the clearest areas. They are responsible, respectively, 1) for ensuring that there are participants there and for the brand exposure, 2) for ensuring that there is revenue coming from sales and 3) for ensuring that your event meets its financial expectations, that you keep it under its timetable — yes, your financial objective may be that your event is a financial loss too, especially when we are talking about an event that is an investment to achieve something else.
It reminds me of a time when I forgot to buy gallons of water for an event with 10,000 people. Yes, it happened. I could have used the excuse that I was saving the budget to meet its financial objective. It would have been a good way out of it.
The role of Logistics is to ensure that materials, resources and people move as efficiently as possible. Agenda’s role is to work with the agenda and its content, coordinating lectures, workshops, speakers, schedule, etc.
Finally, we have the role of Infrastructure, which is to ensure that there is space and equipment to carry out the planned activities. This function is also who coordinates the relationship with the event location. How about that?
Defining and distributing the roles.
Note that I mention them as “roles” not as “job positions”, because you will rarely have one person with each role — often one person takes on more than one role in smaller organizing teams. If you are going to organize an event on your own, you will certainly have to do all of that.
The important thing here is that you know it and set goals for each of your roles — whether they are spread over one or more people. Then you will know the right time to change your “hat”.
I left in the reference materials for this lesson some models and examples of team structure, organization charts, with goals for each one. Download there which is free.
In other words, all this to say: have goals for your event. When I was setting up this lesson, I also defined its objectives.
You may have heard about SMART goals already. Right now, I’m not going to go into too much detail, you create an event that is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
Why will your event go wrong?
Here is what happens: one of the most important lessons in this content on how to plan an event and in this free open course an is that there are two reasons why your event will go wrong and one reason only why your event will work.
The two reasons why your event will go wrong are: 1) not meeting deadlines and 2) your information is disorganized.
An event has a very fundamental characteristic: it has a date to occur. You cannot postpone it. Doing so is a new event, as it can even change the context in which it fits. So you have to pay a lot, a lot of attention in meeting the deadlines. In lesson 6 we will talk about this in more depth.
You need to ensure that the timetable is met — not all of it, obviously, because there are parts that are more flexible, but there are parts that are not. We call them the critical path. This is a series of interdependent deadlines that will culminate in the final delivery of your event.
Organizing your event information before learning how to plan an event.
The disorganization of information happens because an event, even after being planned carefully, can see its circumstances change, new rules come into play, all while it is being organized. The opportunities in which you only start organizing an event when everything is ready are very rare: sponsors, speakers, communication materials, etc. Generally, you will organize the event while these things are being built, as well as the logistics rules so that everything fits together.
It is not uncommon for the information that a person holds to change in the middle of the organizing process. When this happens, it must be ensured that everyone receives the new information — through informal or formal notices, changes to team documents and so on. This is a major cause of loss of efficiency, people working under the wrong (or outdated) premises and team stress.
Remember that I said that the role of the manager is to ensure that your event will not go wrong? Well, he controls the timetable and organizes information. It is the manager’s duty to ensure that you do not fall into these two cases.
There are mechanisms to guarantee it and we will discuss them throughout the course.
Why is your event going to be successful?
Now, perhaps one of the most important points: why is your event going to be successful? There is only one reason why your event will work and it is: you have achieved your goal. This is it. It will not be user satisfaction, money raised, brand exposure, everything happening on time, purchasing water, if none of this is your goal or part of it.
The only reason your event will be successful is because you have fulfilled your stated objective. If you did not define one, you cannot say that your event worked — or worse, you will say that it was a success based on a wrong premise, as it even happened to me.
The first step that you should take with your event is to define its objective, right? Write a general line about what your goal is — or it could be in about three bullet points, depending on the complexity of your event.
- “Achieve 5,000 in profit”
- “That my participants learn about assertive communication”
- “Promote the product to participants” or even “launch my product”
- “10,000 people visiting my website and knowing my brand”.
- “10,000 people not drink water”
Anyway, there are many ways in which a goal can happen and you just need to define yours (or your company). You need to define what success is for you. 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:
- There are six areas that guarantee the success of your event, but today we focus on two: Team and Target.
- Two reasons why your event will go wrong: not meeting the schedule and missing information.
- There is a reason why your event is going to work and it is fulfilling your goal.
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Always look both ways. See you in the future.
