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This article is result of the lovely Tracey, the smiling face of Copy Express, getting married this month. Over the last year I’ve watched her plan for every little part of her wedding in a calm orderly process. Watching her get it done has highlighted the important things everyone should know when planning for an event. So read on to find out what Tracey can teach you.
This is one of the big ones. Nothing more sets you up for a disaster and stress than ‘winging’ an event. Before you even begin any design for material or searching for items, you need to have planned everything. Break down what you want and when you need it in the smallest detail. Work out how long it will take to get each step done, how many things you need, what safety margins you need for unexpected numbers, or last minute changes. This plan will become the guide to everything you do. It should also include alternative options for each item if your first choice isn’t available or out of your budget.
Another of the big ones, it’s all too easy to start adding things to an event because ‘it’s cool’, or someone offered you a ‘great deal.’ Don’t do that, because you quickly find yourself running out of money for the important stuff after you have used it up on the cool things. A good way to avoid this is in the plan assign a value importance on each part of the event. Concentrate on the most important first and work your way down the list as the money starts running out. Something else to think about is allowing for a overrun section in the budget, because it allows for any unexpected last minute costs without effecting anything else in plan
This is the other big one. It is very rare for anyone to be able to devote all their time to planning an event. We all have to get on with the day to day things so planning for the event can become an afterthought. If you start the process well in advance of the event, then you can spread it out in small portions of an hour or two over the months, taking your time to do things right, than trying to cram it all in a few weeks, rushing it and most likely making mistakes.
Just like you are busy with the day to day stuff, so are other people. You have to give them time to be able to adjust their schedules to fit around your event if they are coming or give you plenty of notice if they are not. While there is no set rules of how much notice you have to give people for an event, common sense will tell you the more important it is for people to attend, how far they may have to travel, and how long the event is, the more time they need to be able to plan for it.
I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but building in a safety margin to be able to fix things that have gone wrong is a smart thing to do. No matter how carefully you plan things can go wrong: people can let you down, equipment can break down, your invitees can change their mind, and a thousand other things can happen. By planning some safety margin at the end of the planning process but still well before the event, you have the time to do those last minute fix ups and not have to stress so much about it. This is where the plan comes in again because you will already have alternatives for everything and you now have the time to get them sorted.
I speak from hard learned experience on this one. No matter how carefully you calculate the time needed to plan something, it’s never enough. It’s like the old rubric about committees, that the time needed to make a decision is exponentially multiplied by the number of people needed to make it. You have to allow for others to be slow in getting back to you on things, on how complex an item is to make or how unique it is to source. You have to build in time to realise that you may have a made a mistake on something and then look for an alternative. All of this eats in to the time you have to get the planning done so it’s better to build in extra time for it and not need it than the other way around.
The reason why you need to pick a theme at the very beginning because it will make your life simpler. By knowing the colours and type and other design factors before you start designing or ordering things then it will speed up the process and reduce the overall costs to you.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a conference or a wedding, you need a WOW to make it memorable, otherwise you could be just wasting your time and money. It doesn’t have to be the whole event, it can be one small item, it just has to be memorable so people will remember everything when they remember that wow. It doesn’t have to be expensive or bespoke, it just has to be something that will capture people’s attention during the event, or keeps reminding them long after the event is over. By picking your theme and planning your budget, it will give you limits of what you can do and help narrow down what it can be.
A lot of people fall into the trap of thinking everything has to be the biggest and the best for an event. The reality is that most of it will be thrown away at the end of the event or just forgotten about. It’s a better investment to put your time and money into a few key wow items and keep everything to a bit better than what the minimum is to get by.
No matter what you do, events are by the nature expensive. A great way of cutting down your costs is recycling and reconfigure existing things. Take as an example having a presentation folder printed for a trade show. You could have a special run print just for that event, a great cost, but what do you do with the leftovers after the event. Instead you could go a specialty print shop like Copy Express and have them print the event details on a label that you can then use on existing folder. Left over folders can have a new label printed to cover the old to use them for something else. If you are needing ideas of how to come up with event items on a budget, there are a lot of arts & crafts and wedding sites on the internet that can show you countless ways of doing things on the ‘cheap.’
When dealing with any big job, you can develop a ‘blindness’ to things because you know what it was meant to be with your mind filling in gaps and correcting mistakes. Have someone who isn’t directly involved with the event to spot check your work at every important stage. This is especially true if you are spending money to get something made or printed, because it’s better to have mistakes caught before they reach the printer than pay for reprints or errata to be done.
We do a lot of printing for events and we recommend that talking to us at the beginning of the planning process will save you time and heartache in the long run. We can help you find solutions to what you want, offer alternatives if you don’t have the budget, even take some of the design and ordering workload off your back through our specialised processes and industry contacts. Feel free to pick our brains and use our skills to make your next event go much more smoothly and have more impact.
Almost every event has some form of follow-up task. On the day there will be cleanup, but after that will be thank-you cards (for a wedding) or sales calls (from a trade show). If it was a trade show or sales event, these leads are the WHOLE PURPOSE of the event. Don’t leave deciding how to follow up until after the event – you will be exhausted and probably end up with too much to do (or so you think) and these will fall to the bottom of the priority list. Ensure that you have scheduled staff to focus on this before the event happens so that after the event it will be more likely to take place. (I’m speaking from multiple experiences here.)