The All Inclusive Guide To Perfecting Your Event Budget

As an event management professional, you need to take a ‘master of all trades’ approach to your job. You’ve got to be creative, artistic, and passionate in order to transform your clients ideas from conceptual to concrete; at the same time, you need to be analytical, logical, and disciplined in order to lay the groundwork to bring your events to life. One of the first steps in laying that groundwork – and consequently, one of the greatest challenges in event management – is budgeting. Though we’ve touched a bit on event budgeting in the past, this piece is going to […]

Tips For Branding Your Events

One of the more common reasons for a business to hire an event planner is that they’re looking to raise awareness of their brand. They’re looking to get people talking about what they do, and maybe capture some leads in the process. There’s definitely nothing wrong with that – it’s a perfectly valid reason to host an event, after all. The problem is that a lot of people don’t fully grasp is that branding at an event is every bit as complex as it is elsewhere – perhaps even moreso. Do it right, and you’re sitting pretty with a whole […]

The Five Components of A Good Keynote

I’m not all that surprised so many people try to avoid public speaking. It’s absolutely terrifying, and probably one of the most difficult things most people are ever going to do. Particularly if you’re speaking at a conference in front of hundreds of audience members, making a presentation of any sort can easily be both exhilarating and frightening beyond all belief. Of course, as an event management professional, you should already have a pretty good grip on public speaking. You are, after all, a natural storyteller; your job is to keep the audience engaged with personality as much as words. […]

Why Your Event Needs to Account for Weather

If you think the only time the weather matters is when you’re running an outdoor event, you’d be sadly mistaken. The weather has an impact on virtually every facet of your event, even if it’s not immediately obvious. For this reason, ignoring it entirely is a foolish thing to do.

Today, we’re going to examine how the weather affects your events –and what you can do to account for it.

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The Top Event Industry Trends Of 2015

A new year is well upon us, hopefully it has been kind to you so far. It’s another huge year of event planning and it’s time to start preparing for what’s coming – it’s time to make yourself ready for the technology, trends, and changes that are bound to happen. 2014 was a pretty big year for the event industry – though admittedly, it was something of a rough one, as well. Faced with the echoes of a global economic recession, many event management professionals were by necessity forced to do more with less (though granted, event planners were hardly alone […]

Best Crowd Management Tips for Controlling a Crowd

We’ve said on more than one occasion that event planning is as much about managing people as it is about running events. Today, we’d like to explore that statement with somewhat greater depth. Today, I’d like to talk about crowd control and offer some of the best crowd management tips we could think of from our experiences.

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The Three Most Common Hazards At A Winter Festival

As I’m certain I’ve mentioned on at least one occasion before, winter’s a pretty incredible season from an event management perspective. Although it’s admittedly a little less inviting than the warmer seasons of the year, all that snow – and the holiday cheer that everyone experiences around Christmas – can make for some pretty incredible festivals, in the hands of a skilled event planner.  There’s practically a limitless list of Winter-themed activities you can throw at your guests to keep them entertained, to say nothing of how much fun guests at such events tend to have. Of course, there are […]

The Three Biggest Problems You’ll Encounter Running A Charity Event

Charity events are pretty awesome. Not only can you feel like a great person for serving a noble cause, a well-run event can be one of the most enjoyable experiences in the world. That said, they can also be even more stressful than a traditional conference or show.  See, like any other affair, charity events come packaged with their own unique set of roadblocks. It’s important that you make yourself aware of the challenges you’re going to face. After all, it’s better to mitigate your problems before your event kicks off, rather than addressing them during. Engaging People In Your […]

Top 5 Event Management Tips for Perfect Weddings

A wedding can be one of the most beautiful events known to man. Here are two individuals ready to swear their life to each other; two people who are ready to devote themselves entirely to one another. Attending one of these events, it’s hard not to shed a tear or two. Of course, for every wedding that’s an awe-inspiring testament to love, there’s also one that’s a complete and utter disaster. Those ones are memorable for entirely different reasons. If you’ve been hired to plan someone’s wedding, you need to do everything in your power to ensure that it falls […]

5 Tips for Planning the Perfect Press Conference

As a corporate event manager, you may eventually be asked to plan a press conference. More so than any other event, a properly executed press conference can be one of the best things to happen to a brand. Similarly, a terrible press conference can severely damage a brand. You want to make sure any conference you plan falls into the former category, rather than the latter. Here are a few words of wisdom to planning the perfect event: Make Sure Your Speakers Are Naturals I’ve watched some painfully bad press conferences, and most of them had one thing in common: the speakers […]

5 Signs a Security Team is Bad News

Security guards that you hire for an event should be thoroughly trained and certified and hold themselves to an incredibly high standard of professionalism. Unfortunately, not every security firm holds itself to such high standards. Occasionally, you might come across a firm which – should you hire them – will bring you nothing but trouble. Here are a few warning signs that the security firm you’re thinking of hiring is bad news – and should be avoided at all costs. They Aren’t Properly Certified The first thing you’re going to want to do when you come across a new security firm […]

Five Reasons Your Event May Have Failed

For every successful event, there are at least three that fail – sometimes spectacularly. As an event management professional, you want to do everything in your power to ensure that your events are the ones that succeed. In order for your event to go right, you first need to determine exactly what causes those others to go south. After all, everything happens for a reason. Although I’ve never really been a fan of clichés, that phrase most definitely applies here.  An event doesn’t simply fizzle out on its own. Today, we’re going to go over a few of the most […]

Why Having Board Games at a Conference is a Great Idea

Today, I’m going to recommend something a little crazy. Not all of you are going to be entirely on-board with it at first, but bear with me here – I’m hoping that, by the end of this piece, you consider it as good an idea as I do. What about the next time you plan a corporate conference; why not toss a few board games into the mix? Hear me out here. How many of you played board games like Monopoly with your family when you were growing up? How many of you have used table-top games as a bonding […]

Use Technology to Boost Event Attendance

The thought of planning an event can be exciting, until you realize one thing to be true: you must do whatever it takes to reach your goal regarding the number of attendees. For some, this is a piece of cake. Others, however, have to implement every trick in the book to get on the right track. One of the best things you can do is consider the many ways that technology can boost event attendance. If you focus on this side of things from day one, spanning through the end of the event, it will work out in your favor. […]

How Can Reddit Help You As An Event Planner?

If you aren’t yet on Reddit, maybe you should be. Although Reddit’s community is somewhat small compared to Facebook or Twitter, it’s nevertheless a teeming hub of Internet culture. Reddit doesn’t call itself “the front page of the Internet” without reason; some of the most popular viral content on the web either originated on Reddit or was promoted through the social media site. Used properly, it can be the perfect platform for event promotion.

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The Vital Role of Mobile Technology in Events

A funny idea occurred to me the other day. In much of the world, anyone who doesn’t own a cell phone is considered an oddity. 56% of people on earth own their own Smartphone, while a staggering 91% have a mobile device of some kind at their disposal. The landline phone is a relic! This data is based on the average user, but you can bet money even more people in the enterprise sector will be making use of smart mobile technology.

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Cost-Cutting Techniques for a Tight Event Budget

Budgeting is probably the most difficult task for every event management professional – particularly if you find yourself coming up short. If tight, it can be incredibly tempting to cut corners, but that’s not an advisable course of action. Skimping on features is a surefire way to ruin an event, and it’s not the way to solve your event budget constraints. So…how can you save money? Get creative, there’s ways to cut down on an event’s overhead without causing quality to suffer too much. Here are a few cost-saving event management techniques that won’t completely water-down your event in the […]

Top 5 Health Tips for Busy Event Planners

As an event planner, you’re probably used to doing several hundred things at once while running on little more than fumes. Ignoring the demands of your body in order to focus on keeping the show running is probably old hat to you. On some level, you’re aware that what you do probably isn’t the best course of action if you want to stay healthy…but you’ve so much to do, you don’t really bother thinking too much about it. You probably should. For one, it’s been proven time and again that your mental well-being is tied directly to how well you […]

How to Tell if an Event Venue is Bad News

As any event planner knows, choosing the venue in which an event is hosted may well be the most vital step in the planning process. After all, your chosen venue impacts everything about your event save for the content: how many people can attend, what sort of amenities you can host, and even the general mood of your conference. Now, there’s a good chance you’ve already got the sort of venue you’re going to need for your event clear in your mind. That’s good, because that isn’t going to be our focus today. We’re not going to work out how […]

Easy Steps to “Mapping” the Perfect Conference Layout

There’s a very good reason so many event planners tend to become control freaks. The amount of organization necessary to keep an event running on track makes such traits more or less necessary. If you’re an event planner, there’s a good chance you obsess over just about everything from keynote content to transportation needs to budget constraints right down to your event’s layout. That last one’s pretty important, by the way. “Mapping” of your conference layout design has a significant impact on how attendees will experience the event – and how much they’ll enjoy it. Now, most modern event planning […]