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…

5 Things to Know About Planning a Hackathon

Hackathons — show me a Silicon Valley organization that doesn’t frequently host one, and I’ll show you a business with next to no innovation within its walls. These events — which typically last anywhere from a day to a week — are basically what happens when a tech firm gets all its brightest engineers, programmers, and developers together into a room… then tells them to go nuts creating something cool. Sounds pretty cool, right? Of course, like any event, there’s a fair bit of planning that goes into a hackathon – particularly if it’s to be a productive one. What, as…

Five Legal Issues You Need To Consider When Running A Fundraiser

You’re probably already aware that as an event management professional, there are certain laws you need to adhere to, and regulations of which you need to be aware. Ignorance of the law simply isn’t acceptable – particularly if you want to keep both your firm and your clients out of legal hot water. That’s double true for charity events, which tend to have certain legal strictures surrounding them that don’t need to be considered for other events. Although the laws of each country and region vary, they tend to share certain generalities between them. Today, we’re going to take a…

Five Tactics Every Event Management Professional Should Use To Increase Attendance

In the past, we’ve talked a great deal about how you can tailor events for your attendees. We’ve talked about how to make guests feel comfortable, how to keep them entertained, and the importance of listening to what they’re saying. What we haven’t really talked about is how to get them to your event in the first place. Certainly, we’ve touched a bit on event marketing – avenues you can use to increase awareness, tactics you can utilize to get people interested and draw their attention – but we haven’t really gone into specifics. Today, that changes. We’re going to…

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…

Why Emotional Intelligence Is Important For An Event Planner

As an event planner, you’re expected to be charismatic, confident, and approachable. You’re expected to be a natural storyteller, capable of holding anyone’s attention for as long as necessary. You’re expected, above all, to manage people as much as you are events. For a job like event planning, emotional intelligence is a vital trait to possess. At its core, the term refers to our ability to perceive, understand, control, and interpret emotions. It’s about being in control of how we feel, and knowing why we feel that way. More importantly, it’s about being able to pick up on how other people…

The Event Planner’s Guide To Guest Speaking

So, you want to be a guest speaker, do you? Believe it or not, as an event management professional, you’re actually uniquely suited to guest speaking (assuming you’ve knowledge of what you’re presenting on). This is because, over the course of your career, you’ve gained a unique insight into what’s involved in the creation of a good keynote. You’ve also dealt with your fair share of speakers. Your working relationship with them has been distilled down to a science; you know exactly what to do in order to keep them happy and ensure they give the best presentation possible. This…

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.…

Here Are the Six Signs of a Bad Event Manager

Event management isn’t a career for everyone. It’s a high-stress, fast-paced job that demands quick thinking, terrific organizational skills and a Zen-like sense of calm that would make a shaolin monk envious. While there are plenty of individuals who are capable of thriving at this profession, there are many more likely to crash and burn the moment their plate gets a little too full. Naturally, if you’re hiring an event manager for your staff, you want to avoid picking anyone from the crash and burn category, having the wrong management staff is a surefire recipe for disaster. Here are a…

3 Ways to Get Likes on Your Facebook Event Page

You’ve created a Facebook Event Page and now you need ‘likes.’ The only problem is that likes don’t magically appear by themselves (at least not usually). It’s starting to feel like a party where nobody is showing up. Every new ‘like’ is a promotion for your event by someone other than you! This type of authentic support is priceless, but you may need to work for it. There are many different ways of getting people to like your Facebook Event Page, but here are the 3 most tried and true methods on how to get more likes on Facebook. Promote…

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.

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.

What To Do When an Event Partner Bails

It’s something no event management professional wants to deal with: a key partner or guest speaker has bailed out on your conference with little to no warning. You’re left high and dry, desperately seeking out a replacement (or, failing that, going into full damage-control mode.) While most veteran event planners have likely dealt with unreliable guests, an incident like this could easily seem insurmountable to a less-experienced planner. So what’s a good show-runner to do about a flake? Don’t Panic The first, most important rule is not to let this get to you. Admittedly, it’s next to impossible to address…

Boiled Down, Simple Cloud Computing

I feel as though there’s a mantra which every marketing and tech blogger should repeat whenever they write a piece on cloud computing: “I’m not going to bore you with buzzwords, nor coo how cloud computing is the future of all industries. I’m not going to claim the cloud is the only solution to all your problems, nor am I going to ignore its flaws.” Well all that said: today I’m going to discuss how you, as an event management professional or not, can be served by cloud computing. When used properly, the cloud is an extremely powerful tool in…

Novices’ Guide to Event Management: Part Three

Hey there, folks! We are moving on to part three of our novices’ guide to event management. So far, we’ve covered what an event management portfolio should include and how to organize it so you’re putting your best foot forward. Today, we’re moving on and looking at how to use that portfolio to break into the event management industry. The goal: landing yourself a sweet gig as an event planner. First, you do need to decide whether you want to be an independent event planner or join an already-established organization as their resident event manager. If you’re going to jump…

The Anatomy of Running a Charity Event

There are great reasons for many types of organizations to hold charity events such as fundraising drives and raffles. Not only is it great for one’s brand image, everyone involved – including you – gets to feel good for making a positive impact in the world. However, there are a few things about managing a charity event that make it different from a run-of-the-mill meet-up or conference. You might end up having to do a bit of extra work. In order to make sure things go smoothly, you’ve got a few tasks ahead of you in addition to typical event…

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…

Top 4 Methods to Market Your Event on a Budget

Planning an event can be stressful, but if attendance is strong you will look back and realize it was well worth the time and effort. Here is the big question: how are you going to attract a large number of attendees without blowing through your event’s marketing budget? You may believe that successfully marketing a large event has to cost an arm and a leg; nothing could be further from the truth. There are steps you can take to spread the word on a shoestring budget – or simply make your large budget go that much further! Here are four…

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