Attention Meetings and Event Professionals: Please, Do not skip your event strategy.
Event planning can be overwhelming, whether you’re working as a team or going solo. But with the right strategy, you can achieve cost efficiencies, reduce stress, optimize your planning, and create a satisfying experience for attendees. To ensure success, start by crafting a well-thought-out event strategy. Follow the steps below to avoid Murphy’s Law (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong) and embrace Yhprum’s Law (everything that can work, will work).
Step 1: Identify
Identify every detail. Cover all the bases. Some of the questions to ask may be: Where is the venue? How many attendees are expected? Planning on hosting online and offline participants? Will there be food? Sponsors? Identify the scope and prepare a list of needs and desires. Prepare another list for the vendors and partners. Down the line, this will enable time to surround yourself with the experts and also grant a stress free experience knowing the experienced professionals have it covered.
Step 2: Design & Develop
Ever thought about developing a more experience-focused team? How about leading to better experiences in the future? Where can you improve & optimize the online & in person experience? Whether it is the optimization for experience, cost savings or time: finding the holes to fill where improvements can be made is finding the pain points. Design your planning structure and be sure to include points in the journey where the development of the data points are sprinkled in at every aspect to lead to better experiences and follow ups.
Step 3: Align
Alignment goes hand in hand with organization and collaboration. Alignment with Sourcing, and Marketing Teams and the collaboration together. Alignment with any internal teams means centralizing your project management, assignments and tasks. Centralizing the way multiple members of a team align, work together towards a common goal, collect data and gain visibility makes the expectations clear, deliverables understood and makes repeat events that much simpler to align and executive with again and again. Teams will be happy to collaborate when the alignment process is streamlined and easy to follow.
Step 4: Deliver
It’s showtime! The moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived. To create unforgettable experiences, you’ll need top-notch technology and killer apps (we’re talking about data, data, data). This technology is a vital tool for attendees, sponsors, and your marketing team. To take your customer and attendee experience to the next level, this tool needs to be user-friendly and visually stunning (cue the creative geniuses). Consistency is key, both online and offline. Seamlessly connect people and make communication a breeze. Registration should be a breeze, not a burden. Let’s make networking a blast!
So, when you’re planning your next event, remember that it’s not just about the big day. It’s about the entire journey, guided by a meticulously thought-out event strategy. Let’s make it epic.
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