Chapter 1: Event Planning- An overview

1. What is Event Management, Event planning?

Event Planning
Let’s start with event planning. The key operative word here is planning. All
events – from bridal showers to milestone birthday celebrations to big corporate
gatherings – begin with a plan of some sort. The initial discussions with clients
regarding event ideas, themes, desirable dates, and budget guidelines are all part
of the event planning process.
Event planning starts at the beginning, from the very early stages of concept and
continues all the way until the actual event takes place. And, honestly, for a few
weeks after the event as event planners wrap up details and handle follow-up
items. Event planning involves working closely with the client to design an
event that reflects the client’s vision of the gathering and meets the event’s
objective. Clients who hire an event planner hire someone to plan all aspects of
the event, including the related details and action items, and to see that event
through until its completion.
Event planning responsibilities can include but are not limited to:

● Selecting an overall theme for the event

● Developing a budget
● Selecting a venue
● Negotiating hotel contracts
● Hiring outside vendors
● Planning the menu
● Hiring a caterer
● Arranging for guest speakers or entertainment
● Coordinating transportation
● Choosing the color scheme
● Developing invitations

Event Management
Every type of event is made up of numerous parts that fit together like pieces of
a puzzle. All of those pieces ultimately come together to create an event.
Successful events have all of those related pieces coming together at the right
time and the right place, smoothly, efficiently and according to plan. This
process is called event management. It is, in simple terms, project management
of the event itself.
Event management involves creating, coordinating, and managing all the
different components of an event as well as the teams of people responsible for
each aspect. Some aspects of event management may include but are not limited
to:

● Reserving a location for an event

● Coordinating outside vendors
● Developing a parking plan
● Designing emergency contingency plans
● Ensuring compliance with health and safety standards
● Managing staff responsible for each function
● Overseeing execution of an event
● Monitoring of the event
● Resolving event situations on site

2. What are popular events related to business context?

Seminars and Conferences
● Purpose: Organizations plan and hold these meetings with targeted
audiences and provide them with relevant information.
● Description: Seminars are usually shorter events, lasting anywhere from
a couple of hours to a few workdays. They have single or multiple
speakers and generally keep all participants together in the same space.
Conferences, on the other hand, typically have multiple sessions. They
are usually held at hotels, beginning with a keynote session and then
offering breakout sessions by topic.

Board Meetings and Shareholder Meetings

● Purpose: Board meetings and shareholder meetings both serve essential
purposes. Board meetings serve as an opportunity for board members to
meet to review business performance and meet with company executives
to make important decisions. Shareholder meetings provide companies
the opportunity to share recent performance, targets, future goals, and
business strategies with their shareholders.
● Description: Held annually, biannually, or even quarterly, these two
types of meetings can be small internal meetings of board members or
prestigious large-scale business events for shareholders that range in size
depending on the size of the company and shareholder turnout.
Team-Building Events
● Purpose: Team-building events are meant to boost employee confidence,
goodwill, and morale. These events also provide a unique opportunity for
employees to spend time together in a non-work environment. Team
building events are meant to do just what their name says.
● Description: Outdoor and physical group activities epitomize corporate
team-building events. In fact, companies all around the nation specialize
in hosting team-building events in intricate indoor and outdoor courses of
their own design. Team-building events can also include workshops about
emotions in the workplace as well as sensitivity training.
Company or Organization Milestones
● Purpose: Company milestones provide a business or organization the
opportunity to celebrate a grand opening or other major milestone or
anniversary.
● Description: Company milestone events vary significantly in their
execution but tend to follow similar programs as employee and client
appreciation events. Milestone markers are often celebratory in nature
and can be limited to company employees or be expanded to include
clients, vendors, and even the local community depending on the
company's size and public presence.
Trade Shows
● Purpose: Organizations often attend trade shows as a lead generation
activity. Companies may also choose to host or sponsor a trade show to
reinforce their image as an industry leader among those who attend.
● Description: Event planning for trade shows involves negotiating
sponsorship rates for booth space, advertising, promotion, and speaking
opportunities where company leadership can speak. Trade shows are held
in large spaces, showcasing the products and services of hundreds of
vendors.
Appreciation Events
● Purpose: These programs allow an event host to spend informal time
with its guests in a nontraditional environment, giving both parties an
opportunity to build rapport and learn more about mutual business
priorities. Appreciation events can range from programs geared toward
employee appreciation to those for showing client appreciation, both of
which have become a staple in corporate America.
● Description: There are limitless possibilities and types of appreciation
events that organizations hold throughout the year. Common programs
include:
 - Dinner and theater
- Day at the racetrack
- Suites at sporting arenas
- Day and evening cruises
- Private parties at music festivals
- Holiday parties
3. How has technology transformed the way events get planned,
executed,and measured?
The benefits of incorporating technology into your event management are as
varied as the technology itself. However, there are a few key reasons any
stakeholder should consider integrating a tech stack into their next event
production and process.

Increased Attendee Engagement

When putting on or participating in an event, one of the biggest challenges is to
capture the attention of your audience. Unfortunately, today’s content
consumers have a lot of information flying towards them from all directions, so
they have become accustomed to filtering most of it out unless you can hook
their interest. When appropriately deployed, interactive event technology can
have a positive impact on your audience engagement. For example, live
response systems can allow attendees to answer questions asked by presenters
in real-time.

Measuring Success
How you define success will depend on the event goals you have previously set
for yourself. Regardless of what the metric is, technology will help you measure
it without manual calculations. In some cases, you may only have to log in to a
dashboard to find your answer or take the time to step up a piece of technology
prior to your event and then check-in after the event has closed. Whether you
measure social media activity, event surveys, or merely the number of total
event attendees, event technology will simplify and expedite the process of
tracking and monitoring success.

Consistent Communications
An event does not begin and end at the times published in advertisements.
Instead, there are often weeks or even months leading up to the event full of
planning and sometime after left to wrap things up. Event technology gives you
the opportunity to communicate with attendees long before and long after the
event is scheduled to take place by creating and delivering personalized,
relevant, and timely content.
For example, you may use email marketing campaigns to help build excitement
prior to the event, recommending sessions a particular guest might find
interesting based on their previous click-throughs and interactions with your
content. At the event, you may deploy a smartphone application that will help
remind attendees of session start times or allow them to schedule one-on-one
time with certain vendors. After an event, you may follow up with a survey to
provide more content relating to sessions a participant attended. You can be as
creative with these communications as you would like and create valuable video
content, but ultimately, keeping in touch is an integral part of the attendee
experience at any event.

Data Collection
Beyond measuring success, you must also be able to collect relevant data and
insights to fuel the analysis that will determine success. Gathering such
information will also help you to improve certain aspects of your event and
ensure that your guests continue to have the best experience possible every time
they interact with your organization. By digitally collecting this information,
you will be able to quickly and easily manipulate the data to identify trends in
attendee behavior and use them to inform real-time or future.

Making an Impression
In addition to the practical applications and benefits of using technology at an
event, it will also help you to impress your guests with awe-inspiring
experiences. Implementing technical capabilities such as lighting, sound, and
even virtual reality experiences will leave your attendees with a lasting
impression and have them excited to come back to your next event. Going for
the most significant wow factor with mixed reality technologies can often create
the most memorable experiences, but it is essential not to neglect the finer
details that could be enhanced with much simpler technology. For example, the
use of light and sound can easily set the entire mood and pace of your event,
highlight a specific product or area, or add a dramatic effect to the venue.
4. How do you understand the Pyramid Model of event Management?
Bottom of the pyramid are all the logistics that have to happen to get to the day
of the event. You likely spend far too much time worrying about — and
executing — logistics at this level. These are the important, but often repetitive,
tasks that go into creating and marketing the event. Here, event technology
automates and simplifies these manual tasks, lowering the risk of errors and
freeing you to focus on the elements of your event that drive greater value.
In the middle where the pyramid narrows, the event has arrived. This is why
you have the event in the first place! Chances are you spend less energy than
you should on the implementation effort needed onsite. This is where value is
created — and captured — for your attendees, you, and your exhibitors (if you
have them). Here, technology helps you engage and better understand your
attendees while they’re onsite. As a planner or marketer, you capture their
“physical footprint,” that trail of information and interest they generate as they
attend sessions, answer surveys, tweet or post, and visit exhibitor booths.
When you reach the top of the pyramid, your attendee has gone home. Your
attention turns to preparing and sharing results and identifying areas for
improvement. You’ve probably captured tons of data points, but it’s scattered
and too hard to put together, let alone make sense of, meaning you can’t
demonstrate tangible value for all the effort you’ve spent at the first two levels.
Event management technology helps you analyze and make sense of all that
data, put it to good use to stay in touch with your attendee, and make
improvements to your next event.
 5. What is the combination of best- in class event management
technology?
Today, best-in-class event management technology combines software for
venue selection, registration, marketing, and mobile event apps to automate
your tasks throughout the event lifecycle. Event management technology saves
you time and money and frees you up to think about the big picture rather than
the minu- tiae. The next section looks at the tasks that can be automated if you
harness the power of technology.
Using tech before your event
From the moment the idea for an event crosses your mind — or your desk —
there are tools that help you automate and simplify your tasks. Before your
event, event management technology helps
● Create a budget
● Find, compare, and select the best venue
● Find and coordinate content and speakers
● Create a promotional website for your event
● Promote your event to attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors
● Manage registration and process payments
● Manage attendees’ housing and travel needs
Using tech during your event
Once your event is underway, there are powerful tools to engage your attendees,
while giving you invaluable insights into attend- ees’ interests and preferences.
Onsite, event management tech- nology helps you deliver a better attendee and
sponsor experience with tools that
● Automate and speed up the check-in and badging process
● Encourage and facilitate networking
● Use mobile event apps to engage with attendees and connect them to
important event information and content
● Offer more visibility through sponsorship opportunities
● Help connect exhibitors with qualified buyers
● Collect valuable attendee feedback and other data
Using tech after your event
The value of tech doesn’t end when your event is over. There are tools that let
you view and analyze attendee data to understand their interests, needs, and
preferences; improve your events year after year; and prove their value to your
stakeholders. After-event technology can help you
 ● Share attendee data with sales and marketing teams to better target
follow-up and grow revenue
● Share attendee data with sponsors and exhibitors so they will come back
next time
● Learn and analyze what worked and what didn’t so you can deliver a
better attendee experience
● Measure the success and ROI so you can prove your
6. What does event management technology can help you in event
planning?
Event technology allows you to standardize your processes and run a multi-
event strategy. You save time because the solutions enable you to scale your
event planning and execution and create “muscle memory” around event best
practices that you can lev- erage going forward.
Doing what you do, better
You have multiple stakeholders. You may collaborate with the sales team to
offer events to existing and prospective clients, the execu- tive staff to identify
events that will help the organization meet its goals, and human resources to
plan employee events. You also serve the attendees, the speakers, and sponsors
or exhibitors. And, you maintain good relationships with venues and service
providers. Event technology gives you access to key information and reports so
you can answer questions from all of your key stakeholders.
Saving time and money
Collectively, these tools streamline your tasks and enable you to efficiently and
effectively run your events. And, when you up your event planning skills with
technology, you become almost indis- pensable to your company or your
stakeholders.
For example, when you need to find a venue for your event, you likely send an
email to some venues you’ve worked with in the past or, if the event is to be
held in an unfamiliar location, you search the Internet for a venue, probably
tumbling down a rabbit hole of websites. It can take several days, even weeks,
to narrow your search, and you haven’t even begun to build and send RFPs or
plan site visits.
With event management technology, you have a venue-finding magic wand.
You enter your requisites, and matching venues are automatically identified.
You then write an electronic RFP using an existing template and tap “Send” to
place your request. Ven- ues respond with bids, and the responses are presented
in a way that allows you to make an educated bid comparison — apples to
apples instead of pears to oranges. That’s just one way event technology saves
you time!
Understanding Customers’ Needs
Because you’re collecting data about your prospects and attendees throughout
the event lifecycle, you have information that helps you craft the event they
want. When you promote your events, you gain insight about which email
campaign was most success- ful, where a visitor abandons your event website
and why, which sessions were most popular, and what attendees would like to
see.
Improving the Bottom Line
Finally, event management technology can offer opportunities to generate new
revenue streams of its own through elements like
● Increased attendance and registration fees
● New opportunities to promote sponsors and exhibitors » Customer upsells
● Lead generation
● Sales acceleration
● Closed business

15 terminologies
● Event management technology: Event management technologies can
help to enhance the experience of attendees. Technology makes the work
of an event manager easier and allows them to focus on the main parts of
an event. It helps in all aspects ranging from attendee satisfaction to
project management.
● Event lifecycle: is built on a straightforward premise: build, measure,
learn and build again.
● ROI: Return on investment, or ROI, is a mathematical formula that
investors can use to evaluate their investments and judge how well a
particular investment has performed compared to others.
● Venue sourcing: is part science, part art. Finding the right venue to
ensure your meeting is successful is more than just negotiating a
competitive room rate, meeting space, food and beverage rates, and other
costs.
● Room block management: refers to the process of securing and
managing hotel room blocks for your event's attendees
● Implementation(n): the act of starting to use a plan or system
● Demonstrate(v): to show something and explain how it works
● Physical footprint:It is generally equated in terms of size in square feet /
meters of area that the device will consume in a physical location and its
impact on the overall space.
● Stakeholders(n): a person such as an employee, customer, or citizen who
is involved with an organization, society, etc. and therefore has
responsibilities towards it and an interest in its success
● Muscle memory: is the act of committing a specific motor task into
memory through repetition.
● Abandons(v): to stop doing an activity before you have finished it
● Streamline(v): to improve the effectiveness of an organization such as a
business or government, often by making the way activities are
performed simpler
● Indispensable(adj): Something or someone that is indispensable is so
good or important that you could not manage without it, him, or her
● Tumbling(v): to move in an uncontrolled way, as if falling or likely to
fall
● Best- in- class event management technology: combines software for
venue selection, registration, marketing, and mobile event apps to
automate your tasks throughout the event lifecycle.
● Staffing and scheduling: are human resource allocations that select and
assign employees to tasks within an organization, and specify when and
for how long those tasks should be performed
● Access control: is a security technique that regulates who or what can
view or use resources in a computing environment.