Events can help you develop lasting relations, promote products or changes in your business model, increase employee motivation or even increase brand loyalty by quite a margin. Still, this only goes for organizing a successful event. Failing to do so can be ineffective or, worse yet, reveal flaws in your organization that the general public didn’t even know existed. In order not to allow this to happen, there are several mistakes that you need to avoid. Here are five of them.
1. Underestimating costs
In order to start an event, you need to secure the venue, acquire adequate equipment, deal with the setup, promotion and registration and all of this is bound to cost you. Therefore, what you need is to make a budget and understand that the costs of the event will probably surpass it; however, they won’t be lower than the figure you get upon making the calculation. In other words, while in some instances it may be somewhat discouraging, overestimating the costs is definitely safer than underestimating them.
2. Failing to develop an agenda
One of the biggest mistakes you could ever make when organizing an event is forgetting to outline the goals that you want to achieve by organizing this event in the first place. Regardless if your aim is to raise funds, raise awareness, popularize your brand or create an environment in which you can develop your network, the successfulness of an event depends on its ability to help you achieve these goals. After all, it’s impossible for you to tell if the event was a success or not, if you don’t have the right metrics and the right reference point to base this on.
3. Bad communication
The next problem you need to figure out the way around is the issue of bad communication. There are so many parties involved in the event and if any one of them fails, the entire event could end up a disaster. For instance, a mistake in communication with the owner of the venue that you intend to use for the event could have catastrophic consequences, same as a mistake in communication with suppliers or the invitees. This is why more and more businesses decide to go with a specialized event management company so that they could minimize the chance of this happening.
4. Starting with promotion too early or too late
Hype is one of the most important factors in the success of any event. This means that if you start a promotion too early or too late, you risk missing out on a massive opportunity. You see, if it is done too far in advance, your audience will build a certain amount of hype but after being at a pinnacle for a while, this hype will start declining. Now, there’s no rule as to how early you should start promoting an event. The general consensus is that 6 weeks before an event is more than enough, yet, it all depends on the size of the event, the type of the event and the price of tickets. Sometimes, giving potential attendees a bit more time may drastically increase the attendance.
5. Not being adaptable enough
Things don’t always go as planned and anyone who has ever tried to organize an event knows exactly how much truth there is to Murphy’s Law. Things will definitely go wrong, yet, to what degree and in which fields, you can never know for sure. Just make sure that you’re properly managing your resources, that you’ve given yourself enough time to plan and execute everything and that you’ve entrusted (delegated) tasks to all the right people.
Conclusion
The important thing about these mistakes lies in the fact that if you don’t figure out just how harmful they are the first time around, you’re bound to keep repeating them over and over again. This is mostly due to the fact that you’re bound to organize a number of these events in the future, which means that knowing what to avoid is a handy thing to focus on.
