Conference Event Planning is essential to ensure that you have a smooth running show and that you achieve all the goals of your conference.
You have decided to host a conference and without a doubt, this is going to eat up company resources in many different areas of the business such as money, manpower and time.
So Are you Really Sure That you Want A Successful Show?
This should be the number one question you ask of yourselves because so many companies say they do, but do not allocate enough of the above 3 resources to ensure that the conference will be a success, so let me quickly discuss each point in turn.
1 – Do You Have The Money?
Conference Event Planning and implementation of that plan is going to be expensive even if the conference is a small one. Unless you have an experienced in-house conference event planning team, do not consider doing it yourself as you have no experience and this will lead to disaster, so the first thing you will need to allocate a budget to is your planning team.
This team will make or break your conference and you absolutely should not go cheap here. Get the best for best results. The best does not mean the most expensive and it almost certainly will not be the cheapest. So do not base your choice on budget, but rather previous experience and other successful projects from the team.
Ferrari were willing to pay Michael Schumacher a lot of money, because they were guaranteed that they got the results they wanted from him. I am cheaper than Michael, but honestly, I have never driven a Ferrari, but I could if they asked me too, but the results would be terrible. They would get to save a lot of money, but in the course of the project lose massive amounts by being cheap.
Be prepared to put a good team around you and get the best so that you will have similar results to Ferrari!
2 – Do You Have The Manpower?
Even if you appoint a conference event planning team to help you, you will still need to have an in-house team to relay information and decisions from the company management to the event planners and visa-versa.
The person in charge of your in-house team will get busier and busier with the conference as the day approaches and needs to be allowed to work on the project, so his normal work should be delegated to others to allow them to concentrate on the project.
The same is true of the rest of his team.
The organizing company should give the leader of this team enough authority to make some decisions without having to consult the board of directors for everything and that team leader should also be knowledgeable of the companies policies, missions, goals and other corporate considerations so that he understands the need of the board and can input those into the conference plans.
3 – Do You Have The Time?
Successful conference event planning will be directly proportional to the amount of time given to it’s organization. It is unlikely that you will get success if you start planning today for a 1500 delegate conference next week, similarly, there is no real need to start planning a 10 man conference one year in advance (unless of course it needs it!).
It is likely that a large conference will take up to 6 months to a year in planning. the corporation hosting the event must allocate time to the team for this to happen.
Concepts, themes, budgets, equipment lists, speakers and activities, food, venues, hotels, travel arrangements and many other services will need to be considered and integrated together. Many of these services cannot be handled last minute.
So going back to the original question under discussion: Are You Really Sure That You Want A Successful Show?
This article has been written by Tim Bennett of Argon Animation to help you arm yourself with the tools and information you need to make a success of your Conference Event Planning
