Planning? Ready or not?

As 2019 is winding down, it's a great time to ask the question: "are we planning our events as well as we can?" While planning is a year-round activity for some, many find themselves on a wheel, struggling to keep up and make informed decisions for next year's events.

Your calendar may be filled with events that are no longer relevant to business objectives or, perhaps, you're missing a new event where your target audience (and competitors) are, but you're not.

Answering this question can be difficult but it is crystal clear that proper planning maximises event value and return. This value includes ROI for the company hosting the event as well as more valuable experiences and outcomes for the attendees, sponsors, and other stakeholders.

But where to start? Some clients tackle their entire event portfolio at once with a strategic review. Others chose to begin with a single show - sometimes their largest, or their worst performing. Regardless of where you start, having a review process that's used to evaluate shows and whether or not they belong in your event portfolio will help you avoid the churn of doing the same events with stale activations year over year.

Whether you're planning a single event or an entire portfolio, the process is the same. It starts with understanding and aligning your business, marketing and event objectives. Documenting these objectives allows you to create an event strategy and proper event portfolio. Objective decisions can't be made without understanding the end goal and the criteria by which you will evaluate an event's value.

Our process begins with a discovery workshop that identifies each event's objectives. From the discovery workshop, we establish objectives including ROI metrics specific to each event. While ROI likely varies by industry and event, having established metrics, equations and comparatives will empower you to make informed decisions and to compare events YoY.

Once the audience profile, needs and objectives are established, it's time to chart a content strategy. This way, your event experience and content are built from the ground up for audiences and their needs.

With this will considered foundation, our attention turns to creative and brand to develop ideas, graphics, messaging, experience design and campaigns aligned with audience interests, needs and content. In fact, the learnings established through this process can be used throughout every workstream for an event.

Scale up or down but use this process across your event portfolio and to evaluate new events. Take the time to ask if you're planning your events as well as you can and build a process designed for success. We'd be happy to help you get started because we know from experience, if you follow a solid process and get the learnings right, then the returns will follow.

Written by: Owen Hills, Founder & Executive Producer

Events that Matter plan, create and produce engaging live experiences that maximise your objectives. Tell us what you're looking to achieve, and we'll show you how we can help.