Today I attended an Events Made Easy Seminar in St. Cloud. I finally got to attend a conference/seminar that would be very beneficial to my job! It was a great training, I learned a great deal about planning, documentation and follow up. I'll highlight some of the key things below.
We started out the day talking about what defines and event, who is an event planner and the certifications that come with event planning, what makes events successful and how we define success and what skills does it take to make an event planner successful. One big thing we talked about early and brought up alot during the day is something called Emotional Intelligence. The definition of emotional intelligence is your capacity to deal with an event to get the expected result that you want. E + R = O. Event + Response = Outcome. All of us have 4 skills, that when working together, help us. Our IQ (Intelligence Quotient), EQ (Emotional Quotient), SQ (Spiritual Quotient) and PQ (Physical Quotient). Working with these four together contributes to your self esteem. If you feel good about yourself, you also feel good about what you are working on, which in my case would be an event. We defined this in the beginning of the day and ended our discussion with this as well.
The next thing we talked about was the event planning process, which is the scope of the project.
- Recieve the assignment or have the idea of the event
- Define what needs to happen and why
- Make your foundation decisions: time, location, budget
- Build your master plan
- These next three happen continuously
- Make logistical decisions
- Manage vendors and team
- Monitor progress
- Fine tune and adjust plan
- Finalize and confirm preparations
- Launch a great event
- Finalize and Wrap up
The first step in the above process is to define your success for the event. That covers the following:
- What is it
- Why? (and ask why as many times as needed until the answer doesn't change... have someone else ask you why and be the devil's advocate)
- Overall purpose
- Underlying reasons
- Specific goals for each audience
- Success factors
- Who
- Decision makes
- Audience
- Other groups (including ALL stakeholders)
- When?
- Time of year, month, week, day
- Approximate length
- Where
- Local vs out of town
- On-site vs. off-site
- Type of venue
- How Much?
- Budget restrictions or limits
We did some exercises and the talked about Foundational Decisions that need to be made before all other decisions can be made. The goal is to decide enough to make other decisions and to decide what takes priority. There are 4 levels of decisions that need to be made, with a maximum of 8, that must be done first. Time, location, Budget, Speakers, Attendees would be mine for the next project that I will be working on.
Then we talked about creating tasks lists, time management, timelines, budget planning, the planning team and the execution teams, organizing all of the informaiton, Event logistics like location, facilities, food and beverage, Agenda and programming, marketing and registraiton, special needs and considerations, the WOW factor of an event, working with vendors, communication techniques, stress management and contigency plans, final preparations and to end the process, evaluations from all involved for better planning next time.
My biggest takeaways from the whole day were:
- including all of the stakeholders and how the event will impact them (stakeholders include attendees, companies they work for, family, internal staff, managers, directors.... everyone impacted by attending, planning, volunteering, etc...)
- timeline creation
- task list has to be created before budget can be made
- serving alcohol at events and the certification that you can get to be less liable in case of injury
- resources for swag
- marketing resources
Questions on anything I learned? Contact me at bfavilla@nhmn.com
Thanks!