Blog » Event Planning

Welcome to the Event Planning section of our blog! Here you’ll find all the articles we have that are related to Event Planning as a whole. Obviously we’ll throw in some relevant info about Everwall, if it makes sense to do so.

How to Plan a Spring Gala Your Guests Will Post About

You spent months on gala planning. The flowers arrived on time, the band is warming up, and the centerpieces catch the light just right. The room looks exactly like the picture in your head. Then you glance around during dinner and notice something missing. Nobody is holding up a phone. Nobody is sharing anything. The most beautiful event your nonprofit has ever hosted is happening entirely inside four walls, and tomorrow almost no one outside the room will know it took place.

This happens at galas more than people admit. A gorgeous event does not automatically become a shared one. Guests post when you give them a reason to, and when you make it easy. The good news is that you can plan those reasons into the night the same way you plan the menu or the seating chart. Below are fundraising gala ideas built around real moments people want to capture, along with a few ways to keep the energy going long after the last guest leaves.

The Event Technology Worth Budgeting For in 2027

Every fall, event teams sit down to plan the next year’s spending. The venue gets a line. Catering gets a line. Audio and video get a line, no questions asked. Then someone brings up engagement, the polls, the social wall, the mobile agenda, and suddenly it’s treated like an extra you add only if there’s money left over.

That order is backwards. The parts attendees actually touch during your event are the parts that decide whether they stay in their seats or scroll through email. If you’re building an event technology budget for 2027, this is the piece that deserves a permanent spot, not a maybe. Below, you’ll find where event money really goes, why engagement earns a standing line, how to stop paying five vendors for things one platform can do, and a worksheet you can copy straight into your plan.

Accessible Social Wall Guide for Event Planners

You picked a spot near the main stage. The screen is big, the posts are rolling in, and people are stopping to look. Then someone in the front row squints, leans toward a friend, and asks, “What does that say?” That small moment tells you something important. An accessible social wall helps people in the room read the posts, see the content, and follow along.

For universities and associations, this goes past being a nice touch. Many of these groups have accessibility rules built right into how they buy things. If a vendor can’t answer questions about accessibility, that vendor gets crossed off the list. This article walks through what an accessible social wall looks like, how the WCAG guidelines apply to a live display, and the questions you should be asking before you sign anything. None of this is legal advice, but it will help you have smarter conversations with your team and your vendors.

Social Wall Sponsorship Cost at Conferences

If you sell sponsorships or buy them, understanding social wall sponsorship cost starts with knowing what the price includes. Most conference line items are hard to measure. A sponsor pays for a banner or a lanyard, then hopes someone noticed. A social wall is different. It runs on a big screen all day, people watch it, and sponsors can ask for reporting on their branding’s screen time. That makes clear deliverables an important part of the pricing conversation.

This article breaks down what a social wall sponsorship actually costs, what each price level should include, and how the value stacks up against the usual conference sponsorship options. If you organize events, there are notes for you on how to write a package that earns its price. If you sponsor them, you’ll know what to ask for before you sign.

Medical Meeting Social Wall Moderation and Compliance

If you run an annual congress, your medical meeting social wall should be the least of your worries at 6 a.m. Your real fear might be a slide from a late-breaking session reaching a public feed before the study’s publication, or a public teardown of how a clinical trial was ran. A social wall can feel like one more place where that could go wrong. However, with the right controls, it becomes the opposite. It becomes the single display where you decide exactly what thousands of physicians, industry guests, and reporters see.

This article walks through the two main risks that actually matter at a medical conference. It explains how moderation gives you control over both and includes policy language you can adapt for your attendee guidelines. Compliance comes first here. Attendee participation is worth having, but at a medical meeting it is the second priority when you need to control the message.

What Association Sponsors Will Pay for a Social Wall

Pricing season is stressful. You are staring at a blank line in your sponsorship prospectus, and someone on your committee wants to know what to charge for the social wall. Guess too high and it sits unsold. Guess too low and you leave money on the table for a whole year. The good news is that you do not have to guess at all. Real associations publish their sponsorship rates in public prospectuses every year, and once you see what they charge, setting your own social media wall sponsorship price becomes a lot easier.

This article walks through the published benchmarks, how to price the wall based on your own event, what belongs in each package, and why the margins are better than most people expect.

2027 Event Trends to Plan For

If you are building your budget for next year right now, deciding which 2027 event trends to plan for means making a bet. You are guessing which parts of your event will pay off and which parts will sit unused. The events that do well in 2027 will not be the ones with the biggest screens or the flashiest opening video. They will be the ones that planned exactly how attendees take part, step by step, the same way you plan catering or seating.

On one side are events that design participation on purpose, on the other are events that put people in a room and hope something happens. The 2027 event trends below all point in that same direction, and each one comes with a key takeaway on what it means for you and a link to read more about it, if you’d like. If you read our event trends article in 2025, think of this as the next chapter, with more focus on getting people involved.

What Makes a Social Wall Work at a Hybrid Sales Kickoff

Picture the main stage at your sales kickoff. The lights are up, a leader is on stage, and the room is loud with cheering reps. Now picture a rep sitting at home, watching that same moment through a laptop. They see the back of someone’s head, hear muffled applause, and feel like they’re watching a show instead of being part of one. That gap is the biggest problem with a hybrid sales kickoff, and most companies don’t notice it until half their team has quietly checked out.

The good news is that this problem has a clear fix. A shared social wall, one that both the in-room crowd and the remote reps can see and post to, puts everyone on the same footing. This article walks through why hybrid SKOs lose remote people, and how one screen can pull them back in.

A Timeline for Planning Your 2027 User Conference Social Wall

If your team is planning a user conference for May or June 2027, you are probably deep in the fall prospecting window right now. You are lining up venues, sketching out the agenda, and figuring out how to price sponsorships. Somewhere in the middle of all that, someone will ask whether you should have a social wall at the event.

The answer is easier when you ask it early. A conference social wall is a large screen (or several) that shows attendee posts, photos, and messages in real time. When teams decide to include one at the last minute, it becomes a scramble. They pay rush fees, they miss the chance to sell it to sponsors, and they end up stapling it onto a plan that was already finished.

How to Launch a Last Minute Event Social Wall

Your event is two days away, and someone just asked why there is no social wall in the main hall. Maybe a sponsor requested one. Maybe you saw a competitor’s wall and realized attendees would love it. Either way, the clock is running, and you are wondering if there is even enough time to pull it off.

There is, and with plenty to spare. A last minute event social wall is one of the most realistic add-ons you can pull together on a short runway. Most teams have a polished self-service wall built and running in a few hours at most, and the fastest go from signup to live in about ten minutes. You do not need a printer, a shipping deadline, or weeks of promotion. You need an account, a screen, and an afternoon.

This guide walks you through a quick social wall setup step by step, with rough timing for each part. If you want the full, no-rush version later, we have a complete step by step setup guide you can bookmark. For now, let’s focus on getting live today.

How to Get a Graduation Social Wall Approved (in One Meeting)

Most commencement committees walk into their first planning meeting assuming that any new technology means months of paperwork. Someone brings up an idea, and before the sentence is finished, another person mentions the request for proposal, the vendor review, and the budget cycle that closed weeks ago. The idea gets tabled, and the ceremony ends up looking a lot like last year’s.

That assumption is correct for big-ticket items. It is not correct for a graduation social wall. At the price point a social wall costs, adding one to your graduation ceremony often falls under your university’s micro-purchase threshold, which means it can go on a departmental card without a formal procurement process. If your committee holds its first meeting for a spring 2027 commencement this October, you have plenty of time to add one, and you can do it in a single meeting instead of a single semester.

This article walks through the case for having a social wall at commencement in the first place, where it fits in your commencement planning timeline, who needs to say yes, what to bring to that October meeting, and how to handle the small amount of vendor paperwork that does come up.

How to Put a Social Wall on the Big Screen at Winter Commencement

The lights dim, the graduates file in, and the arena screen usually shows the same static slide it has shown for the last twenty minutes. Meanwhile, families in the stands are already snapping photos, texting proud grandparents, and posting pictures of their graduate. All of that energy is happening on hundreds of phones, and none of it is on the screen everyone is looking at. A winter commencement social wall changes that. It pulls posts from families and graduates into one live feed and puts them on the big screen for the whole room to see. If you are the […]

Social Media Wall Cost in 2026 and How to Budget for One

If you have ever tried to figure out the social media wall cost, you probably ended up more confused than when you started. One company shows a single event price. Another shows a monthly plan. A third one asks you to “contact sales” and never lists a number at all. It feels like every vendor is speaking a different language, and none of them make it easy to compare.

The good news is that social wall pricing follows a few simple patterns once you know what to look for. In this guide, we will walk through the three main ways these products are priced, what actually makes the price go up or down, and how much you should plan to spend based on the size and type of your event. By the end, you will know exactly which pricing model fits your situation and how to budget without overpaying.

How to Add a Private Social Wall to Your Sales Kickoff (No Public Posting Required)

You spend months planning a sales kickoff. You book the venue, line up the speakers, and put together an agenda packed with product updates, awards, and big goals for the year. Then the general session starts, and the room feels flat. Reps sit and listen. The remote folks on the video call are somewhere between paying attention and checking email. Nobody asks the question everyone is thinking. The wins your top performers pulled off last quarter go unmentioned because there was no good moment to bring them up.

This happens at a lot of internal meetings, and it is not because your people do not care. It is because there is no easy way for them to speak up in a big room full of coworkers and leadership. So they stay quiet, and all that energy stays locked inside their heads.

SKO Themes for 2027: Getting Your Sales Team AI Ready

Sales teams are already using artificial intelligence every single day, whether or not their company has an official plan for it. Reps use it to write emails, research prospects, prep for calls, and clean up notes after a meeting. So when you sit down in Q4 2026 to plan your next sales kickoff, the biggest question is not whether AI belongs in your program. It already does. The real question is how you help your team use it well without losing the trust and judgment that close deals.

That is what makes AI readiness one of the smartest directions for SKO themes in 2027. It feels current, it speaks to what reps are actually doing, and it gives your leadership a reason to bring everyone into the same conversation. Below, we will walk through why this theme works, why people still matter more than software, specific theme names you can use, and how to build a full day around the idea.

Sales Kickoff Ideas to Get Employees Engaged

Most sales kickoffs follow the same pattern. Leadership presents the new numbers, product teams walk through updates, and enablement runs a few sessions on the latest playbook. Reps sit, watch, and clap when they are supposed to. By lunch on the first day, half the room is checking email under the table.

It does not have to go that way. The best sales kickoff ideas give your team clear, low-pressure ways to join in, share what they know, and feel like part of the plan instead of an audience watching it happen. This article covers why so many SKOs feel flat, what real engagement looks like, and specific activities you can use before, during, and after the meeting.

LinkedIn Event Marketing Strategy for 2026 (Creator-Led Events)

Most people promote events on LinkedIn the wrong way. They post a graphic with the date, time, and a registration link, then wait for sign-ups that never come. The post sits there with two likes and zero comments, and they assume LinkedIn just doesn’t work for events.

The problem isn’t LinkedIn. It’s the approach. LinkedIn doesn’t reward flyers. It rewards people who say something worth talking about. The accounts filling rooms in 2026 aren’t running ads or posting digital posters. They’re sharing opinions, telling stories, and starting conversations that pull people toward the event naturally.

This article walks you through a LinkedIn event marketing strategy built for how the platform actually works right now. You’ll get a posting structure, a way to write posts people respond to, a comment plan, and a simple two-week launch schedule you can copy.

AI for Social Wall Management with Everwall’s MCP Server

Running a social wall during a live event means juggling a lot at once. You are watching posts come in, deciding what to approve, pinning the moments that matter, and updating the room on what happens next. All of that happens while the event is moving fast around you. Now imagine describing what you want in plain words and having an AI tool help you get it done, without giving up any control over what actually shows on screen.

That is where AI for social wall management can make a real difference. Everwall’s new MCP server makes possible. This article walks through what it does, how it works, and why it matters for the people who keep events running.

Trade Show Lead Capture Strategies That Convert in 2026

You spent thousands of dollars to be at the show. You paid for the booth, the travel, the shipping, and the staff. At the end of it all, you walk away with a stack of scanned badges and a spreadsheet full of names. Then two weeks later, your sales team tells you almost none of those “leads” answered a call or an email.

This happens more often than most exhibitors want to admit. The problem usually is not the number of leads. It is the quality of them. A badge scan tells you someone stood near your booth long enough to get scanned. It does not tell you if they cared, what they needed, or whether they will ever remember talking to you.

AI Personalization in Event Marketing

Imagine signing up for a conference. Before you even arrive, an email greets you by name, suggests three sessions based on your job title, and reminds you about a networking lunch you might like. That feels helpful. Now imagine that same email mentions the coffee shop you visited that morning, references a private message you sent a colleague, and predicts who you’ll want to avoid at the after-party. Suddenly it feels like someone has been watching you.

That gap between helpful and unsettling is the whole challenge with AI personalization in event marketing. The tools have gotten very good at predicting what people want. The hard part is knowing when to use that power and when to hold back. This article walks through how event planners can use AI to make experiences better while keeping the trust of the people who show up.

1
2
3
4
…
15
→