Event planning tips

Planning an event shouldn’t be stressful and time-consuming – it should be fun! Here are some event planning tips to help you put together your event.

Start planning early

You can never start too soon. The earlier the better! Get your initial ideas together, once you’ve decided on the foundations like theme, location and time of year, the schedule for you event can start to take shape.

Research is key. Research the kind of event you want to host.

If you have held past events, ask yourself…

• What was good at this event?
• What didn’t work?
• What could have made it even better?
• What were the little details that people really enjoyed?

Get feedback from past events, ask attendees what they liked/didn’t like about the event.

Look at events other people have hosted, maybe ones you have attended yourself.

All of this will being together ideas and opportunities for your own event.

Create A Timeline

If you start creating deadlines for when decisions or certain jobs need to be done, this is a better way to keep you on track than an open ‘To Do’ list. Adding dates and deadlines will keep you on track and keep the event planning running smoothly.

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate!

To keep the whole process stress-free, don’t try to do it all yourself! Delegating will make the experience more enjoyable and ensure that elements of the event planning aren’t overlooked.

Put together a team of trusted people who can help you – this could be friends, family, your venue and suppliers.

Make sure you check in with your team often. This keeps things on track and avoids any issues further down the line.

Stick to Your Budget

It’s really important to first of all, set a budget, then be strict with your budget.

Make use of technology available for budget setting and you can share this with other managers to ensure everyone is clear on the budget.

Keep track of what you’re spending where, this will make sure everything runs smoothly and leave you with a safety net should anything crop up at the last minute.

Don’t Take a Risk When It Comes to Venue

Deciding on your venue will be one of the major decisions you make for your event. This will need to be done in the initial planning stages and will need to be booked and confirmed in advance.

Create a checklist of the things you want from your venue. Once you’ve reviewed all your options, look at the pros and cons of the potential venues you have in mind.

Get Social

Make sure you take every chance to promote your event! Create some easy to share visuals for Facebook and Instagram – you can do this for free using Canva. Share these with your team make sure everyone is involved in sharing and commenting on social media to hype up the event.

Tag your venue and suppliers too, this will help to spread the word.

Say cheese!

Take pictures wherever possible – throughout the whole planning process – these will be so useful for your social media and to help when planning future events.

Learn How to Do Marketing

One of the biggest components of every great event planning tips list is to nail the marketing. If you want people to be excited about your event, you need to learn how to get the marketing just right. This comes down to social media, influencers, content marketing, PR and more and can be a full-time job in itself. At the start of your event planning, decide whether you have the skill set and capabilities to take on the marketing role and if not, bring in someone with this expertise and create a budget around this area.

Stay Calm, Have Fun and Enjoy the Event!

It’ll be alright on the night! Once all the hard work is done, remember to enjoy your event yourself and have fun with your guests!