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Whether you’re having a large conference or a small family meeting, a proper event planning strategy is a core factor. It’ll be good to have detailed planning and sound strategies to achieve a successful event despite its complexity. From establishing a perfect budget to holding the event, you need to consider numerous components to make the event successful.
If you’re looking for the best guide and steps for planning an event or, then you’re in the right place. We’ve put down some essential steps that you should take to ensure you jump-start the process, keeping track of and fulfilling the event’s objectives.
Step 1. Define the Goals and Objectives of your Event
The key step when planning your event is establishing the objectives and goals of the event. It’ll be essential to establish the reason and purpose for having this event. Seeking responses to these questions will help you; what’s the primary goal of this event? What do you want to achieve from the event?
After getting the proper goals and objectives of the event, you can now create the preliminary scope of your event. When creating the scope, you’ll need to include key details and objectives, then point how you’re looking to achieve them. You can include the attendees, dates, location, and type of event, as they’ll help you in the next step.
Step 2. Organize your Team
When planning for an event, it’s always essential to have a working team. It’s good to ensure that every team member has a specific role in the team. Choose one key person who heads the team as the event manager and allocate the other specific duties or charges such as entertainment, sponsors, publicity, marketing, communication, etc. The main essence of assigning the team members duties is creating a reliable system of accountability.
Having a proper accountability system will make it easy to achieve the event’s set objectives and goals. After organizing your team, it’ll be essential to keep tabs on the team and ensure you track their progress and timelines of the set dates. You can choose to use project management tools to achieve the monitoring and tracking process of your team.
Step 3. Establish your Event’s Budget
Before having any other activities, it’ll be good to create a working budget as it’s one of the core parts of an event. When drafting the budget, ensure you capture all the departments and things to avoid surprises and determine the approximate resources they need. When establishing your budget, ensure that you break it down into the different expenses you expect in the event.
These expenses may include the venue, entertainment, decor, staff, software, marketing, and miscellaneous expenses. You can later make changes or updates on the budgets as the plan solidifies. It’s vital to ensure these changes appear on the final budget.
Step 4. Set the Event’s Date
The date of the event is an important aspect in ensuring you achieve all the goals of your event. Some events have recurring dates, while for others, you need to set a new date. When choosing new dates for an event, there are numerous things you need to consider. Allow the attendees adequate time to prepare, approximately five months, check for the holidays, seasons, and the availability of the key participants. Choose a date most attendees are comfortable with to avoid surprises and inconveniences.
Step 5. Select your Venue
The choice of the venue and date are essential factors you need to ensure you carefully check as they affect the shape of the whole event. After getting your preferred dates for the event, research the best venue that suits your visitors and your needs before choosing. Consider the rates, the availability, structure, size, amenities like toilets, and hygiene before selecting it. Lastly, ensure the venue is secure and easily accessible to everyone.
Step 6. Brand your Event
When having your event planning process, creating a brand for your event is essential to help your event stand out. Thus, when branding your event, choose an event theme and website design that sets a high standard for your event as they’ll be essential for providing direction and vision to your event. When branding your event, consider:
● Logo, typography, and colors: they should have consistency across the marketing touchpoints
● Event name: choose a name that reflects the vision and main component of your event
● Theme: create a theme that ties all event elements together; a memorable branding slogan can work.
To brand your event, you can use these branding elements across all the platforms, such as your website, social media, and other platforms.
Step 7. Identify and Establish Potential Sponsors and Partnerships
When having your events, some partners and sponsors could partner with you to help you ease the financial burden or increase the potential of participation. The main aim of having this partnership is to make the event a success. You can seek to partner with cooperates, sponsor to help with material or monetary assistance. In addition, you can choose to partner with community organizations to increase the potential of higher attendance. It’s essential to consider choosing partners whose themes relate to the objectives and goals of your event.
Step 8. Identify and Select Your Technology Tools
When planning for the event, you need to identify and select your technology needs and the implementations. Choose the tools necessary for the implementation, such as ticketing, registrations, productivity tools, and mobile apps to enhance the communication on the event. Lastly, choosing the proper recording, live streaming, and engagement tools to enhance the event’s experience will be good.
Step 9. Creating a Sound Promotional and Marketing Plan
After planning your event well, it’ll be essential to choose to have a proper plan of attracting more audience to your event. Therefore, you should develop a sound promotional and marketing plan to help spread the event and ensure more audience gets information about the event. You can achieve this through advertising on social media, blogging, online advertisement, print media, and even using billboards. Ensure you choose a promotion plan that reaches a lot of audiences.
Step 10. Determine the Measure of Success
After getting everything ready, it’ll be good to track the events and processes to determine the measure of success. You can achieve this by checking if you’ve achieved your event’s objectives and goals. Alternatively, you can use analytics and data to determine if you achieved the set target of the attendee or how many tickets you sold. Lastly, to determine the success of your event, you can check for feedback from the attendees. You can get the physical feedback by checking on the event’s websites and social media pages.
Conclusion
Events come with numerous preparations and processes that most individuals and planners find challenging to have a proper event plan. However, this guide provides the perfect steps and tips for event planning you should follow. It’ll be essential to work through each step and ensure that they come together to achieve the best event. Lastly, it’s essential to start planning for your corporate or individual event as early as possible to ensure you get all your pieces and steps moving.
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