Struggling with venue selection or perhaps scheduling the right event program? Discover best practices for successful event planning from true event professionals.
Event planning is basically about putting out fires wherever you go. Organizing a successful event is not easy but also not impossible. Some things you'll learn along the way but some skills can be mastered if you take your time and do your research.
That's why we came up with the "Master event planning" series to help you with finding the perfect venue, choosing the right speakers, crafting the best program, and much more. This time, you can explore the event planning tips with Jacob Brown, an IS specialist, and Jere Halligan, a senior director, from the American Promise, a cross-partisan organization committed to winning the For Our Freedom Amendment.
American Promise is a nonprofit organization with a mission to pass a constitutional amendment to set reasonable limits on campaign spending in American elections. Our sold-out event, the National Citizen Leadership Conference, June 10-12, in Washington, DC, brought together Americans from over 30 states to learn, network and collaborate on how to mobilize citizens and elected officials alike towards our mission.
The American Promise chose Eventee to seamlessly deliver a professional and easy-to-use experience for their attendees at the National Citizen Leadership Conference. Explore how they solved various pain points with a mobile event app.
What pain points did you face at your events that made you start using an event mobile app?
The decision to use an event app came about because of a desire to enhance our reputation as we significantly scale our staff, in order to show that we are the premier organization in this space. Therefore, we wanted to use a sleek yet easy-to-use app for our event. Eventee was a great fit.
Can you share what other tools you use when managing your event? What is your tech stack?
For this event, we solely used Eventee.
Running events is an extremely time-consuming profession. How do you find the time to implement and manage Eventee during the event?
This is a challenge, for sure. Eventee is easy to set up once you get the hang of it. We did run into some technical roadblocks with external links, not being able to do the granular scheduling we had anticipated, etc. More lead time would have been better for us, but we managed to get enough done to have a successful implementation and our attendees seemed to enjoy the app.
Do you have any tips on how to make the perfect program for your event?
Start planning way earlier than we did. We had planned to get an app in April, but didn’t end up closing our contract with Eventee until May. That gave us about 3.5 weeks to get everything, not just operational, but in tip top shape. I would say, at least double the amount of time for training additional admins, building agenda, speakers, etc. as well as doing registration directly in the app. We had to get registered attendees into the app manually, which was far more difficult than simply managing registration via the app itself.
What is your thought process behind choosing the right speakers for your event?
Balance. You want to have a wide array of speakers in order to meet all attendees' interests. However, you don’t want too many, otherwise your programming will run too long and drain people’s energy and attention.
How do you find the best speakers and how do you motivate them to speak at your event?
Connections. We leveraged a lot of employee networks and our industry’s community to find great speakers.
What channels are you using to promote your event to make sure you sell enough tickets?
We sold out! A lot of word of mouth and direct outreach.
How do you measure the success of your event? What is your major KPI?
Attendance but also legislative movement in Congress. We have specific goals around moving the needle across the political spectrum and we demonstrated success with that.
Moving to the business aspect. Some event planners aim to cover costs with sponsorships and view ticket sales as profit. Others don't offer ticket discounts or free passes and rely on ticket sales as their primary revenue source for event expenses. What's your approach?
We utilized both. Tickets + donations + sponsors as well as discounts/scholarships for those who could not afford it otherwise. This allowed us to bring a diverse coalition of age ranges to participate and share insights at our event.
Where (how) do you find the perfect venues for your events?
We only have one in-person event per year in Washington, DC so we can organize meetings for our supporters with the US Congress. The most important for us is proximity to Capitol Hill in DC for our lobbying efforts alongside a reasonable budget and nice atmosphere.
What do you think are the key factors to consider when selecting an ideal venue?
Budget and atmosphere are critical, but make sure the customer service is top notch. No matter what, something will come up when organizing an event, and having responsive and effective venue staff goes a long way to keeping your event on track.
The last question is aimed at our new readers. Is there anything you wish you had known when organizing your first event?
Eventee was fantastic, the only limitation I noticed and wished I had known was that we could only book one workshop or lecture at a time on a stage. We intended to use the app for our lobbying efforts, however, we had multiple meetings, in the same time block, at the same location. We thus had to improvise a bit, but this is an edge case. Overall, a fantastic product and would recommend highly for its ease of use and communication capabilities.
