The Benefits of Finding Event Workers In House

Planning an event is a lot of work. At the same time, it can be quite a bit of fun. When the big day (or days) finally rolls around, you want to know you did everything possible to take care of each and every detail. The difference between a successful event and one that comes up short is often times the staff. You put a lot of time into attracting an audience. Now, you have to serve each and every attendee to the best of your ability. This all starts with hiring the right event staff. Will you contact a […]

Why You Need Proper Harassment Policies

Let’s say you’re running an event, and one of your guests is harassed by one of your new volunteers.  That’s a bit of a nightmare where PR is concerned, isn’t it? Now take things a step further – imagine you’ve no idea how to deal with such an incident; that you don’t have any harassment policies in place that dictate how you and your team should respond. Let’s take that story a step further. That guest, disgruntled at how your events team mishandled the situation, ends up taking you to court for what happened. Now not only are you dealing with a […]

Event Staffing Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs

As you begin to plan for an upcoming event, there won’t be a day that goes by when you aren’t making big decisions. Which venue is best? How much do you want to spend? Are you comfortable with the features and amenities of the space?

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How To Determine The Proper Size For An Event Team

Today, we’re going to take a brief look at the process involved in putting together your ‘dream team’ for running an event. For newer event managers, one of the toughest tasks before them is estimating how large to make their team. Is there such a thing as too many volunteers? How many security guards should there be? What about caterers and engineers? I’m here with a few general rules of thumb which – while they’re by no means set in stone – should help you at least start to estimate how many people you’ll need to keep your show running […]

Choosing an Event Venue: Size Matters

When the time comes to schedule, organize, and manage an event, there will be an unlimited number of questions running through your mind. While every question deserves an answer, there is one you have to deal with before the rest: which venue is best for your event? You can’t do much until you answer this question. After all, attendees want to know where the event is taking place, as this may help them decide if they will attend. A variety of details deserve your attention when choosing an event venue. These include: Size of the venue Number of attendees Location Features […]

Determining The Best Floor Plan For Your Conference

Your conference’s layout is every bit as important as what you’re hosting it for. An event with a terrible floor plan is extremely likely to end in disaster. For that reason, you need to make sure your conference uses its space as efficiently and effectively as possible. That’s what we’re going to discuss in today’s piece – how can you determine the best floor plan for your conference? Figure Out How Much Space You Actually Need First and foremost…how much space are you actually going to require for your event? How many attendees are you expecting to show up, and […]

Everything Your Business Needs To Know About Hiring An Event Planner

Events are an awesome tool for growing your business if they’re run well – but that’s actually harder to do than you’d think. If you don’t know what you’re doing when you plan an event, there’s a good chance it’s going to end up being a dud. It’s really no surprise, then, that so many businesses hire event planners to do the job for them; it’s the best way to make sure things go off without a hitch. Of course, bringing in someone to manage your events – whether you’re hiring on a permanent or contractual basis – comes with […]

It’s All About Location: Managing A Last-Minute Venue Change

Picture this: everything about your event is coming along nicely. You’ve an awesome stable of speakers lined up; some great vendors to fill the booths on your floor, and a killer schedule that makes it all but certain everyone can attend the keynotes they want to see. Then, just a few weeks before the event, the unthinkable happens – you can no longer use the venue you’d originally planned on. Maybe it’s the result of an error on your part (event planners are people too; they make mistakes). Perhaps the venue owner stiffed you. On the other hand, it could […]

Location, Location, Location: Everything You Need To Consider When Choosing Your Venue

Now, granted, location is something I’ve talked about in the past. Venue selection is so central to the event planning process that it’d be bizarre for an event management blog to not have addressed it on at least one occasion. Today, however, I’d like to put together something a little more comprehensive – a one-stop guide that lays out every single detail you need to account for when you’re figuring out where you want your event to be. It’s been said on many occasions that location is everything. In some ways, where your event is situated is even more important […]

It’s All About Location

You’ve heard it before and we hope that you agree, location as well as venue is key to any event. It can be the hardest thing to search for, but it can make or break the overall feel for your next event.  Last week, we focused our series on event technology and security. This week we will be turning our attention to everything you need to know about having the best venue and location that is a fit for your needs. Our focus will be on the following titles: Seven Greatest Event Venues in the World Location, Location, Location: Everything […]

What Can An Event Management Platform Do For You, Exactly?

The best event management professionals are those men and women who can keep the rapt attention of an audience for hours on end – and make it look easy. They’re those folks who can crunch numbers, analyze their resources, and puzzle out an intricate web of suppliers, staff, and locations in their head. They thrive under pressure, and they wouldn’t trade the high-speed environment of event planning for the world. There’s a good chance that they – and many other event planners, for that matter – could easily get away with not using any technological tools to help them run […]

Everything You Need To Know About Using Tweetwall

There’s a lot that goes into being a great event management professional. You’ve got to be a natural storyteller who’s great with people, a born leader, and a logistics master with a head for numbers. You’ve got to be capable of thriving in a high stress work environment, and picking up on the energy of those around you to keep yourself going. You’ve also got to have a great toolkit at your disposal – a set of applications and equipment that makes your job easier and your events better. You need to understand how, when, and where to use your […]

Ten Best Practices For Keeping Your Mobile Event Platform Secure

Like it or not, event management is increasingly becoming a highly technological field – particularly where mobile’s concerned. The power and efficiency that smartphones and tablets bring to the table for event organizers and their teams are just too incredible to ignore. As a result, we’re seeing mobile devices being utilized in an increasingly diverse fashion within the event industry. There’s just one problem – in a lot of cases, those devices might not necessarily be secure. See, here’s the thing about mobile. Although it may well be one of the most powerful productivity enhancement tools in human history, it […]

A Look At The Event Industry’s Obsession With Slideshare

The event industry – and honestly, enterprise in general – seems to have something of an unhealthy obsession with a little service known as Slideshare. Marketed as the world’s largest community for the sharing of presentations, the site allows pretty much anyone to design and upload a slideshow, which can then be shared across the web (or at a presentation). It’s basically PowerPoint set up to run with web 2.0. On the surface, the reason for this fascination seems pretty clear. Slideshare allows speakers to readily display facts, figures, and charts to the audience. They allow for something of a […]

Past Event Data Should Impact Future Strategies

As an event organizer, you want nothing more than to achieve a high level of success. After all, everything will fall back on you in the end. Rather than look at the event planning process as a blank slate, it would be in your best interest to examine the past. Ask these questions: What were the successes and failures of your last event? Looking back, what would you change about how you marketed the event? Are there any changes you can make this time around to avoid the same mistakes? As you address these types of questions, make it a […]

How You Can Keep WiFi Secure At Your Events

As I’m certain you’ve heard on more than one occasion, mobile technology isn’t going to go away. Smartphones and tablets are today as much a part of our lives as electricity. What that means from an event management perspective is that it’s expected – or more like demanded – by attendees that a public WiFi connection is available at the events they attend. After all, they need to be able to connect to the Internet in order to share their experience, don’t they? It’s not just mobile technology, either. As I’ve noted on more than one occasion, embedded devices – […]

Getting Your Attendees More Invested In Your Events

It sort of goes without saying that you want people to remember the events you put on.  You want them to talk about your firm and your brand for months afterwards; to wait with bated breath for your next convention. Naturally, the best way to do that is to give them exactly what they want. Now, here’s where things get a little complicated – information and entertainment are only part of the equation. These days, it’s not necessarily enough for people to go to a conference and passively absorb information, or attend a convention where they wander aimlessly around the […]

How To Deal With Equipment Theft

It’s an inconvenient fact about the world we live in – some people are no good, and will always try to get something for nothing. In the world of event management, that translates to theft of some pretty valuable equipment. See, that’s the problem with event planning: whenever enough people collect in a single area, there’s almost guaranteed to be a few bad eggs. As an event management professional, it falls to you to make sure those bad eggs can do as little damage to you and your guests as possible. Today, we’re going to go over some of the […]

Five Client-Related Event Management Woes

Not every event management pitfall you’ll encounter is the result of a bad vendor, a shifty partner, failing equipment, or a lazy volunteer. Sometimes, the problem isn’t with you or the event at all – it’s with the person who’s hired you. Everyone is going to deal with a difficult client at some point in their career, and it’s important that you be prepared for some of the issues you may encounter. Here are a few of the biggest client-side problems you’ll run into in the event management field, and how you can deal with them. Make sure you familiarize […]

Event Management Tips & Tricks

As you are well aware, there is quite a bit that goes into being a successful event professional. We’ve touched on many of the topics before on our blog, however over the next two weeks we are going to focus on the main event management tips and tricks to help you be successful so that you can continue to throw amazing events that will keep your clients hiring you for more events and recommend your services to all of their event manager friends. This series will hopefully either teach you something new, or be a refresher course to keep you […]