Managing Your Team When Something Goes Wrong

Your event team – volunteers in particular – are an important element of every event you run. It’s imperative that you properly manage your team to ensure you keep things running smoothly. Unfortunately, that isn’t always going to be possible. Sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, something is going to go wrong.

For one reason or another, members of your team may fail to do their jobs properly. Don’t let it derail your event. By acting quickly and decisively, you can make sure that a minor problem with your volunteers doesn’t transform into an outright catastrophe.

But what can you do?

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…

Five Ways Event Planners Can Recharge Their Creative Juices

Discover the top five ways event planners can recharge their creative juices and overcome creative burnout. Hey there, folks! Today we’re going to talk about creative burnout, and its role in event management. As you well know, creativity is one of the many traits shared by the word’s most successful events professionals – and it’s something you’ll need to have in droves if you’re ever to succeed. But what happens when the well runs dry? It’s bound to happen eventually – and a big part of being a creative thinker lies in recognizing it for what it is, and taking…

How Much Should You Spend On Event Marketing, Really?

We all know that it’s extremely important to market your events effectively. If you don’t get the word out, you don’t sell tickets. If you don’t sell tickets, you don’t meet your budget projections. And if you don’t meet your projections… Yeah, you get the idea. What I’d like to discuss today – aside from how to market, we’ve already talked extensively about that – is how much of your event budget you should allocate to marketing. This doesn’t just apply to event management, of course. The question of how to know when one’s spending their marketing budget effectively is…

What Exactly Is A Strategic Meetings Management Program

Strategic Meetings Management may well be one of the most commonly-misunderstood business methodologies in the world. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons meetings are so widely and universally decried as horrendous time-wasters – no one really has a decent understanding of how to tap into them. Let’s see if we can’t change that. Today, we’re going to take a brief look at the precise meaning of strategic meetings management. We’ll go over the reasons a business might use such a program, and examine what SMM is – and isn’t. By the end of the piece, you’ll hopefully have a more…

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?

Support Your Team & Avoid Event Burnout

Tell me if this sounds familiar – lately, you’ve been feeling a little out of sorts. You’re stressed. You’re tired. Nothing really seems as exciting as it used to – where once you were energetic and passionate about your career, now it’s a struggle to even drag yourself out of bed every day. My friend, you might be suffering from a case of burnout. For one reason or another, the difficulty of being an event planner – the high-octane life associated with the career – has finally managed to bring you down. It’s time for you to take a step…

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…

Marketing Statistics Every Event Manager Could Use

As an event manager, you will have a lot on your plate. From setting and following a budget to selecting guest speakers, there won’t be much time to sit back and relax. Your marketing strategy can make or break the success of your event. Take the right steps upfront and it will continue to pay off well after the event comes to an end. But make too many mistakes along the way, and you could soon find yourself wondering what went wrong. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to guarantee marketing success. A big part of this is tracking…

The Complete Guide To The Care And Retention Of Volunteers

Volunteers are the core of most any event. Very few trade shows, conferences, and fundraisers can properly function without a dedicated, devoted event team running the show behind the scenes.

In other words, if you don’t have the proper framework in place – if you aren’t doing as much as you could be to attract people to your events team and retain them – then your event’s inevitably going to suffer.

Employees: Everything You Need To Know

Employees are the KEY to having a successful event. No matter how successful of an event planner you are, you can’t put your ideas and hard work into action without help. Whether it is full time employees, volunteers, or paid people for an event, it is important to be able to manage them successfully so they are happy, and so are the attendees. Last weekend, we focused on everything that you need to know about location. So now that you know about WHERE we are going to focus on an important WHO for your next client and event. The topics…

Social Marketing versus Public Relations: What’s The Difference, Really?

There was a time not so long ago when marketing and public relations were two very distinct – if closely-related – fields. The former was primarily concerned with selling the products and services of a brand; the latter was entirely focused on maintaining relationships. Then social media came along, and thoroughly muddied the waters. With the advent of social media, an entirely new marketing paradigm was born – relationship marketing. “The days of traditional marketing, such as running ads, commercials, and other one-way forms of promotion are rapidly fading because the rise of relationship marketing is taking a front seat,”…

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…

Why Your Venues Location Is The Most Important Factor In Attendance

Every event planner knows that where they choose to host a meeting or conference is every bit as important as the event itself. Ask anyone who’s been involved with the event industry for even a marginal amount of time, and they’ll tell you as much. If you don’t have a great location, then nothing else matters, right? Even if you’ve got what seems to be the perfect venue, a less-than-stellar location can deep-six any benefits you might gain from it. Why is this, though? One word, folks: proximity. While there are certainly other factors that come into play like technology,…

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…

Seven of the Greatest Event Venues In The World

It goes without saying that no two venues are exactly the same, and not all event sites are created entirely equal. Today, we’re going to take the time to give a nod to the top places to throw an event. These locales are the best of the best. They’re the living legends of event management; they’re the places where everyone wishes they could host. Chances are you’ve heard about at least one of these places in passing – some of the biggest events of the past decade have been hosted within their walls, after all. Madison Square Garden We’ll start…

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