5 Things to Avoid when Event Planning
When planning an event, it’s crucial to avoid common pitfalls that can subtract from its success. Even professional event managers make these mistakes from time to time, so here are 5 things to be aware of so you can avoid making these event planning mistakes.
Not focusing on the budget
Money, Money, Money. It makes the world go round.
It’s very important to ensure you have a proper budget for the event and you stick to it. Easier said then done as it can be easy to get carried away when planning, especially with all your suppliers upselling all their additional extras.
Top Tip: to ensure you keep to your budget, ensure you track all your spend or commitment to spend. Make a note of all the payment deadlines so you are on top of them so do you don’t get any surprises.
Food Waste
The key to a person’s heart is through their stomach, right?
To do that, you need to ensure you are catering for all dietary requirements. The easiest way to do this is to ensure that you ask them upon registration. However prepared you are though, you will likely still have a surprise vegetarian or gluten free attendee.
Top Tip: I always recommend catering for vegetarians, vegans and gluten free as a standard to ensure that if you get last minute attendee dietary requirements you are covered for this.
Not communication with stakeholders
Stakeholders. They are very important to the success of the event and as they have often brought into the event, it is important to keep them happy. A great way to go this is to regularly communicate with them - this can be through periodic email updates, slack channel or monthly zoom calls. The level depends on the type of stakeholder, for example loyal customers it would be appropriate to do this via email updates on upcoming events. Whereas for event sponsors I find the best way to communicate is video call as they need to trust you as they are investing money and resources into your event.
Not using the right ticket platform for your ticket sales
When selling tickets to events, you need to decide what platform you would like to go with. They all have their own fees and charges so it is important that you do your own research.
Top Tip: Some of the most popular event selling platforms are eventbrite and tickettailor.
Some platforms sync up to social media so you can easily share the event on your social media. Otherwise it is important to explore your marketing options, which leads us nicely onto the next category…
Marketing
All marketers will tell you that is it important to have consistent marketing that is on brand.
Inconsistent marketing can impact upon your brand and make you less likely to sell tickets to your event or get the attention it so rightly deserves. To combat this, you can do any of the following: outsource your marketing to a freelancer or agency, plan and schedule your marketing prior to the event being announced or create marketing content on the fly.
Which you should go for depends on how much you like producing marketing content and if you can be consistent with it. If you are looking to outsource the marketing you need to make sure you have budget for this. Personally I find that I need to plan out content in advance, otherwise I am inconsistent with my posting. However different techniques work for different people.
Top Tip: If you are planning on doing your own marketing - get and use Canva. It will help you keep all your marketing content consistent and the basic version is free - so great for your event budget.
