How do you plan a great event?
Events are complicated, stressful affairs that require a lot of time and energy to manage effectively. Event planning creates more structure around an event, allowing event and project managers to:
Reduce stress
Run events smoothly
Iron-clad legal matters
Connect with the right people
Using event planning, each member of the team helping you manage the event knows exactly what needs to get done, and by whom. By creating more structure around the event, your team ensures:
All attendees get the experience they expect
Schedules for speakers and stakeholders proceed as planned
Participants know when and where to proceed to each stage of the event
Event planning ensures a detailed plan is created and implemented throughout the entire event schedule. Done effectively, event planning management leads to more organized and coordinated experiences that your attendees will fondly remember.
When to use the event planning template?
The event planning template is perfect for conceptualizing and planning out your scheduled event. You can use the template to:
Organize all necessary tasks to get the event up and running
Coordinate your event budget so that you can pay for all your plans
Select the ideal venue to host all your attendees at the event
Determine the appropriate schedule for speakers, forums, and activities
Let’s say your company is hosting a seminar. You’re inviting expert guest panellists to share trade secrets for all attendees to learn. Your ultimate goal is to educate and excite your attendees about the possibilities of applying those trade secrets.
Coincidentally, your company’s products or services are ideally suited to help attendees apply those secrets to their own potential growth. Basically, the event is a lead-generating opportunity, and you want the event to make the best possible impression on all event participants.
By creating a structured, organized event, you can create an overarching narrative that sells attendees on the value of your brand and your services. The event planning template helps you map out that narrative and include checklists for each deliverable. This way, you can align all stakeholders on how best to convert attendees into paying customers.
How to use the event planning template
The event planning template is built to help you plan, structure, organize, and execute your events with precision and efficiency. It allows you to break down the complexities of managing an entire event into smaller milestones that make it easier for your team members to deliver upon.
The best part of the event planning template is that it includes a built-in project timeline that resembles a Gantt tracker. This is an especially helpful feature in the planning stage of your event. You can set start and completion dates for certain tasks and line them up together in one cohesive timeline. This allows you to manage your resources more efficiently as you set the stage for each sequence of the event itself.
Step 1: Organize your event into coordinated sections
As the event project manager, the first thing you should do with your event planning template is create sections that map out your team’s task completion workflow. The best approach is to label each section as a stage in the task completion sequence: to-do, in progress, pending review, and completion.
You can name each section with whatever label best suits your unique needs. But try to follow that general outline when creating your sections. Creating and managing your event means each task must move through the sequence to reach the completion stage. Don’t overcomplicate it, or you may risk throwing the event plan off course.
Step 2: Break down the event into necessary tasks
Now you’re ready to list out the tasks that will create your event. You can create a new Task by clicking the + in each section on your project board. Add a detailed description of the expectations and tag the team member who will manage the task until it reaches the completion section.
As you list out your tasks, always keep in mind that some tasks will be dependent on other tasks being completed first. If you know a certain task is dependent on another, make a note of that in your description. This makes it easier to visualize the event project workflow so you can deploy the right resources for each task.
Step 3: Assign the proper resources to complete the tasks
Once you’ve listed out your tasks, now you’re ready to assign resources to ensure each task is completed. This is where you can think about budgets, equipment rentals, permit negotiations, and so forth.
The template uses work estimation techniques, meaning you can tag each task as a small, medium, or large deliverable. Use the relative work estimation to start visualizing how many resources are required for each task. Then, you can coordinate how you’ll deploy your resources and complete the project.
Step 4: Create your event timeline
With all your tasks listed, and your resources accounted for, you’re ready to use one of the best features of the event planning template: the built-in project timeline. Click on the show project timeline button at the top of your project board to activate the timeline feature. Now, you can start mapping all your listed tasks across the project timeline.
Simply drag each of your tasks from your project board onto the project timeline and map out your event. Once you drop a task onto the project timeline, click and drag the task horizontally to assign the appropriate start and end dates. This will create a visual overview of how each task will be completed so that your event can proceed as intended. Your team members can view the event timeline to keep their task completion schedules accountable to the end deliverables.
Step 5: Monitor status updates and task dependencies
As work on each event task gets underway, your job as the event project manager is to monitor status updates and report on progress to other stakeholders. You can use the Reports feature to generate status reports and give regular updates on how the event planning work is going. This will give all event participants confidence that the scheduled event is on track to be delivered just as advertised.
