Event Planning Is a Team Sport
Ask any event planner and they’ll tell you that planning any event, big or small, can be a stressful ordeal. It requires creativity and a knack for multitasking all of the moving parts. While the majority of the responsibility falls on the event planner, make no mistake, event planning is a team sport. And since event revenue is the lifeblood of many organizations, it’s critical that everyone gets on board.
To learn more about how staff across departments are involved with events, we spoke with a few of our customers. Here are a few tips they offered to you and your team to make event planning a little less stressful for everyone.
Executive Leadership
While you may not necessarily be getting your hands dirty in the actual event planning, executive leaders shouldn’t discount the impact they can have on the event planning team. After your staff has spent months planning the perfect meeting for your prospective and current members, be sure to acknowledge their hard work. This often goes a long way.
Membership
As a membership professional, you are the frontline to your organization’s members. You have a unique insight to what matters to them. By looking at direct member feedback and engagement trends, you can help the event planner determine what session topics would be valuable to meeting attendees. In addition, you can use the relationships you’ve built to identify members that would potentially be interested in being a session speaker.
Marketing
From the planning period to the post-show wrap up, marketing should be involved with event planning. While there are many ways you can impact an event, one of the biggest is communication and promotion. It’s up to you to coordinate with the event planner to determine the best timing and format for messaging – including items such as save the dates, reminders, and post-show surveys.
IT
You shouldn’t be surprised to see the IT department on this list – they are a crucial player on the event planning team. Don’t believe me? Have the WiFi go out at your event and see who you turn to. Someone from IT can assist venue providers with audiovisual needs in addition to providing technical redundancies to ensure attendees have all they need from a technology standpoint.
Events
Instead of appearing to take it on and tough out an event all on your own, engage others to help you in the delivery of successful outcomes. The entire team benefits when an event goes well, why not have them contribute to its success?
To learn more about how MemberSuite can help your association with event planning and execution across all departments, check out our web demo.