Six Steps to Planning a Successful Event
The secret to a successful event is all in the planning. There are many things to consider, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Follow our six steps to ensure your event goes smoothly and stays on budget.
Define your goals and objectives
Before you start looking at venues, it’s essential to sit down and ask yourself: What are you hoping to achieve through this event? Are you looking to attract donations? Or promote a specific product launch? Are you aiming for 40 guests or 400?
It’s also important to be specific about your audience. Knowing your key goals and having quantifiable metrics of success will help you during the planning and budgeting stage.
Establish a Budget
When you want everything to be perfect, it’s easy to spend a bit more here and there. But before you know it, this can add up to be hundreds or even thousands over budget. Creating a realistic budget, with contingency, will help you manage your expenses.
Your budget should include these key elements:
Venue hire: Including any additional costs such as insurance.
Catering.: Food and refreshments at break.
Staffing costs: Including setup, coordinating, and cleanup.
Entertainment: Whether it’s a DJ, or booking guest speakers.
A/V rental: Depending on the venue, you may need to hire additional equipment. For example, a projector.
Decoration: If this is a themed event, you may need to purchase or rent additional decoration.
Marketing: Promoting your event is crucial to its success, so if you have the resources, it’s good to plan a budget for marketing.
Contingency: No matter how well you plan your event, additional costs are bound to crop up. Add a contingency of ten percent so that you have a safety net.
Planning and event timeline
The most important aspect of planning is to give yourself enough time. It’s incredible how time vanishes when you’re up against a deadline. For larger events, you should ideally give yourself 4-6 months for planning and execution.
If the date is flexible, check for any potential clashes. You don’t want to book a venue, only to find out that your event clashes with an important religious holiday or that a key guest speaker is unavailable that day.
To ensure everything goes smoothly, we recommend creating a master plan and timeline that incorporates all the key deadlines in the lead up to the event. This will also help you to designate tasks to your team. Your timeline could include: submission of permits, insurance policies, confirmation of any guest speakers, marketing and promotion key dates, invites sent out, rsvp deadline, and a detailed timeline for the actual day.
Partnerships
Depending on the type and scale of your event, you could look at partnering with other organizations for sponsorship. This could help reduce your costs and also aid your marketing and promotion efforts.
When you’re looking for businesses to sponsor your event, make sure that you highlight a clear benefit to them. Creating a compelling argument for sponsorship will improve your chances of success.
Promotion
Now that the planning is underway, it’s time to generate awareness and buzz around your event. You may have the most incredible speakers lined up, but if people don’t know about the event, they won’t be attending.
Create a publicity and marketing plan, and include key dates in your event timeline. Your marketing plan should include:
An event announcement on your website.
Email blasts and newsletters.
Social media – scheduled posts.
Press and media – including your press release.
Capture the event with photos and video
After all your planning and hard work, it’s crucial to capture your event and its success. Hire a professional photographer so that your images are high quality and high resolution.
These images can be used as part of your post-event follow up, which can include a press release about the event, plus thank you’s and acknowledgments to any sponsors and attendees. These images can also help in promoting future events. Vistasuite makes saving and sharing your images and video easy.
Create a space for your event, and you can add team members or attendees. All of your images are saved in one place, easily accessible and effortlessly organized.
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