9 Tips for Organising a Successful Event

Set clear objectives

In order to understand whether you made the right moves, you need to have SMART objectives. During the event you’ll know what is important, after the event you’ll be able to measure your effectiveness.

Start planning early to anticipate

Create a document available to the entire team working where each member would be able to see the tasks of others. For a better organization, you can use Google templates, programmes such as Asana, Trello, GanttPro, Teamweek for planning. Even simple Excel won’t let you down.

Establish a marketing plan

Every event needs a sound marketing plan with strong branding and a clear communication strategy (you can use 4P’s) that stem from clearly identified goals and event overview. 

Set a budget

Without a set budget, it is easy to overspend. You can easily create spreadsheets to manage your budget and track expected versus actual costs. Descriptions are absolutely necessary for the efficacy of your event budget and your ability to share it out with others

Descriptions are absolutely necessary for your event budget. Add a detailed description to the item you’ll need for your event. This is an important column to include in the case where your budget needs to be approved by someone in your organization who may not know what each line item is.

Target the right main audience

The more you understand your target audience, the easier it’ll be to promote your event. If you’ve organized a similar event in the past, you’re already several steps ahead. You can now have a closer look at your past attendees to understand your target demographic (you should have gathered attendee data). If you don’t have access to previous event attendee data—or you haven’t put on an event before—you can simply look at who is attending events similar to yours.

If you’re trying to locate new attendees, use tools like Facebook advertising. The platform allows you to leverage advanced, granular, and highly accurate audience targeting. Personalizing the message to the targeted audience is a good idea to involve consumers into your event.

Understand stakeholders

Prioritize stakeholders according to the different levels of partnership that you could offer to them. Understand the benefits that they could benefit from taking part of the event.

Monitor satisfaction

Assess participant satisfaction and set up a plan of action to optimize your future events. Create a survey and measure the difference between how an event is perceived and what it was expected to be. Find out how the participants discovered the event and improve your marketing-mix by working on the price, the product, the communication and the distribution.

Inform Participants

Inform participants and speakers about the opening hours of the event, the buffet hours, social media to follow or any mobile app to download on this occasion.

Keep in touch after the event

Even if the event came to an end, the organization work is not finished yet, you have to keep contact with different stakeholders, thank everyone that participate directly or indirectly in the event, share photos and videos, ask about satisfaction.