A successful event takes vision and an enormous amount of planning, coordination, attention to detail and precision follow up. It takes organised people to focus on all of the many details related to a function. No matter what size or type of event you are organising each is different but the same organisational processes apply.
Every event you have ever attended took a great deal of planning and coordination. It is important to note that when going through each of the process that each one will interlink as you develop your event or meeting.
Pre Event Research
Pre event research is very significant this helps you set your goals and objectives for having the event and also determine your audience. It also gives you the prospect to collate the information you require for the designing stage or to discover any limitations that may arise.
Design
By asking yourself the six simple questions of why, who, when, where, what and how will pull all the information that you will require for moving onto the planning stage.
The first question to ask yourself is why. You have already started this process in your research stage by now you should have determined your goals and objectives for having the event.
Who are the stakeholders of the event? This is broken down into two sections first is the internal people required to make the event successful this can be from catering, staging, partners etc and your external target audience.
Next you must look at when and where to hold the event. Take into consideration any additional events happening in the area that will affect you reaching your target audience and securing the appropriate location. Depending on the type of event the time of day in which it is held is also important, e.g. business networking events usually work best mid week over breakfast so that the audience is not missing a part of their working day.
Now you must look at what resources you will need to hold your event. Once you have determined what resources you already have you can now look at the resources that you require and establish how you will obtain them. Like finance will you have to charge attendees or do you require a sponsor to cover costs, manpower needed to deliver the event, the equipment needed and catering required.
Planning – Creative Influences – staging, decor, invite, presentation, food, briefing papers
Event planning is a process filled with multiple tasks and responsibilities that change daily during the planning and production process. Excellent time management and coordination is required as you must determine how much time you have to act or react before and during the event.
Collecting all the information and coordinating each detail and activity minute by minute helps you to provide and communicate a full brief to suppliers, speakers, caters etc this way each person knows what their roles and responsibilities are and who to report to if anything goes wrong. Having this process with effective communication will help the event manager to consider the implications and put alternative process in place.
Evaluation
Successful events don’t just happen – they are the product of many hours of planning and shared responsibility in an organization. But when the event is finished it doesn’t just end an evaluation is essential. A joint evaluation should be completed by participants and stakeholders.
This will help you devlop a report in which you can find out whether the event was worthwhile, how the event could be improved, whether there were better alternatives, if there was unintended outcomes, and whether the event goals and objectives were meet.
