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 […]

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 […]