Event organizers, welcome back!

Missed our first post? Check it out! How Networking 2.0 Can Help Event Organizers – Part 1

As we mentioned in the first post, Networking 2.0 is very essential when it comes to planning and organizing your event.

So to make things easier for you, today we will be giving you tips that you can use before the event, to better prepare yourself.

This will be broken down into 3 parts, with both things you can do online and offline:

1)   Preplanning- The most critical and the foundation of planning.

This is where you set your goals and the theme of your event. It is also where you determine the size of your event, the staff requirements, attire requirements, and it is where you will determine which venue will best accommodate your goal. Essentially everything is built from preplanning so make sure you dedicate enough time to this phase as it is the corner stone of a successful event.

Goals: your goals can be anything from:

• Growing your email signup sheet ie Product launch like MojoMotors
• Uniting communities like Wonder Women of Boston
• Promoting a paid conference like 100 Beers

2)   Planning- The actual execution and tactics that go into planning the event.

This is how you will go about organizing your event.

Planning online:

• Create a bio for the event
• Create a Google doc or spreadsheet that includes all of the people necessary to get your event up and running.
• Create blog posts that highlight speakers, sponsors, partners, venues etc.
• Have a page with sponsor packages available (a downloadable PDF or file to fill out).

Planning offline:

• Create business cards with your contact information on the front, and the details of the event on the back.
• Attend other related events with other organizers to develop relationships.
• Make site visits to different venues to get a sense of space and help you decide on a location.

3)   Pre-event- The promotion of your event before it happens.

Pre-event planning online:

• Do preliminary research (keywords) to promote your event to the right people.
• Use hashtags on Twitter to promote your event and create a following.
• Create sample tweets to give to your partners so that they can easily promote your event.
• Use sites like eventbright.com and/or meetup.com to promote your event to people you wouldn’t normally reach on Twitter and Facebook.

Pre-event planning offline:

• Get a sense of when people are going to leave with.
• Use banners and prints to promote sponsors onsite.

Now this is just a sample of what you can do, and I know this sounds like a lot to do, but it’s really not. And once you do these things, organizing your event will be much easier.

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