© Ramon van Jaarsveld
- Multiple events a year
- Several goals to achieve
- Keeping a common thread
How do all your events align with your organization’s mission?
When organizing more than only the annual stakeholder event for your organization, than it can be challenging to align the several events throughout the year. The following 7 tips will help you to offer an event range that is consistent in its message and attractive to attend.
Get empowerment. Event managers often operate independently, but for many reasons their expertise isn’t always shared. As an event manager make sure to team up with your marketing or communication peers and get the mandate and empowerment from your management. Orchestrate this joint approach in time and benefit from a smart and powerful cooperation for all your upcoming events.
Set a theme. A theme, carefully chosen, carries a promise. It knows to trigger people. Take the time with your team to formulate a theme in which your stakeholders recognize themselves. A strong theme will make onward choices for your events much easier to make: from panel discussion themes to venues, everything now comes from a clear vision.
Built in throwback moments. Upon the start of your event, make sure to look back. Give the audience a quick overview of previous event outcomes. Maybe even show a little video impression. It helps repeat attendees to freshen up their memory and it shows new attendees how valuable the last event was .
Built a community – with your audience. Your speakers address the daily concerns of your attendees. By letting the audience discuss these presentations afterwards, through different dialogue formats, it creates a sense of ownership among the attendees. The presentation just heard will come to life by bringing in personal experiences and concrete examples from attendees. As such attendees can easily become enthusiastic ambassadors of your event. Imagine how much easier it is from here to ask attendees to bring a guest for any next edition?
© Ramon van Jaarsveld
Built a community – with your speakers. Invite future speakers from upcoming editions for your current edition. As such they can get an idea on what to expect during their contribution and they are able to already connect to the audience. You might even want to spend an “alignment session” with all speakers. An exclusive moment to get to know each other and hear about everyone’s different approaches to the event theme. An investment that will cost you time, but that will bring a stronger focus among all of your guest speakers.
© Flynth Adviseurs en Accountants
Balance content with social. Strong content is key. By adding some soft elements, a message can become even stronger. Think of a fun schoolbus to transfer attendees to and from the venue, let a pianist play music in between the presentations and invite vloggers and influencers to generate interesting content during and after the event. Add surprising elements that will stick to people’s memories. The more likely it is for people to come back!
Evaluate. Now that your event is over, it is already time to prepare for the next one. With a joint approach of event manager, communication/marketing manager and general management, it is valuable to go over the evaluation results together. Or better, ask the audience live and onsite a number of evaluating questions . Like “do you expect to come for the next edition?”. Vulnerable maybe, but better discuss the outcomes at the spot than speculate once everyone is gone. Learn from the past edition, share it with your speakers and apply lessons learned in every new edition!
© Vladimir Wegener
By applying the above steps you’ll increase the chances of creating a more consistent message, getting more repeat and new attendees and end up with valuable event outcomes. Obviously, feel free to reach out to me as I’m happy to think along with you!
Now, are you ready for your next event?
PS: Two pictures published in this blog article have been made by event photographer Ramon van Jaarsveld. Last year Ramon suddenly passed away. In dear memory I’d like to still use his work and with it think back of the pleasant cooperation we had during the many events throughout the years.
