You know how important it is to run an event that has an impact with your audience. Events are being used for providing added value, building relationships and strengthening existing ones.
The question is, how many elements do you need to master to be able to run a successful event of any kind? Here we will show you the 5 key areas to consider when running a successful event.
Step 1: Planning
The foundation to a successful event is planning. When starting to plan your event you need to be clear on following things:
Why: What is the purpose and goal for the event. You need to know in detail why you’re hosting an event.
Who: Who do you want to attend your event? You need to know your target audience to be able to craft the content, message and style of your event.
Where: Knowing where you want to host the event is important and the location of your target audience is of utmost importance. Is it a local event or global one? Being clear on the target audience’s location matters when choosing location, venue and is it an online, physical or hybrid event?
When: Decide on time when you are going to run the event. Seasons are usually a strong consideration for delegate attendance, but for the time being the current pandemic will also be having an impact on attendance levels, so you need to choose wisely on the timing of your event. You’ll also need enough time for other activities related to your event like promoting your event.
Step 2: Preparation
Once you have a robust plan in place it’s time to move to preparation. There are three extremely important steps in preparation you need to be clear about to avoid any unpleasant surprises.
Budget: Having an adequate budget for your event is essential. Your budget needs to include many areas such as venue, equipment, contingency funding and list of expenses for individual items. Remember that you need to update your budget often to avoid problems later on.
Venue: Finding the perfect venue can be time consuming and a tedious task. You should always take into account the number of attendees, location, possible health and safety regulations that are in place and what your event includes. It’s important to have 3 options available that suit your budget and purpose of the event. Seeking assistance from a professional venue finding company makes this process easier and faster, freeing up your time and helping you get the best price and options.
Online event: If you’re planning to host an online event like a summit, you need to find the best platform that suits the purpose. As there are many options available, it’s very important to know what is reliable and within your price range. Also, additional tech and booking platforms are important to get right and using a trusted provider provides more security for the attendees.
Step 3: Promotion
How effective would an be event without attendees? To get your target audience to notice and show interest in your event you need to promote it, irrespective of whether it is an internal or external event. How can you do it effectively? Knowing where your target audience is and how they respond, email/social media/advertising? Social media definitely helps you reach your audience easier; you do need to understand which platforms to promote on to get the most effective reach.
You’ll also want to know what your target audience is interested in so that you can craft your message correctly. Keeping your attendees updated ensures that you don’t get unplanned cancellations or other issues that could impact your event’s performance.You also need to communicate effectively so that everyone involved in running and planning the event is clear on their responsibilities and tasks.
Step 4: Execution
When you get to this step you’ll be needing to answer questions like is the venue being kept informed on important things, is your team and attendees kept informed and updated, are tickets and instructions sent out to attendees and is the event contingency plan in place.
We all know how important contingency is especially since the start of the pandemic, there have been so many changing protocols and each venue has their own personal operation, so its important to understand what they have in place so you can communicate this with your attendees.
Having everything planned effectively makes execution much easier for everyone and the venue will be also happy to work with you to achieve your event goals. You’ll also stress a lot less when things are in correctly in place.
Step 5: Feedback
After your event you’ll want to know what your attendees thought about the event. Asking feedback not only provides you information but also shows you care what your attendees think and that you want to develop to create better events.
Feedback gives you valuable insights into what went well, where you need to improve and you can get ideas for your next event.
There are many ways to collect feedback. You can have a chat with the attendees, send out questionnaires or use social media channels for example. Remember that follow-up is a crucial part of the process as it builds relationships and adds value to everyone.
As you can see, it takes plenty of work and time to run a successful event. However, when you put in the effort it’ll pay off multiple times.
If you are up against your own deadlines and need an extra support, Sheer Edge can provide a complete event solution or compliment your existing team.
Get in touch today to discuss how we may be able to ease the pressure for you; hello@sheeredge.co.uk or call us: 0330 223 3176
