Event planning involves a whole lot of planning and administrative work. It's a very demanding job which needs proper forecast, scheduling and arrangement to have a successful conference. Even before laying the first written draft of your planning, you need to ask certain questions to yourself:
- What are you or your client trying to achieve out of this conference?
- Who are your target audience as in delegates and sponsors?
Once you have your answers, it's time for you to start planning your conference.
Decide a Perfect Date
It is suggested to have number of dates in your mind, so that if you have to cancel one date on account of unavailability of your chosen venue or anything else, you can switch to another. Avoid selecting a bank holiday because your potential attendees may not like to visit the conference on special dates. Make sure that you do not hold your conference on same date as other conferences held by your competitor or related industry. It is advisable to plan your conference just before or after another conference in your city, the topic of which is related to yours. Conference attendees most of the times attend conferences on related topics to increase knowledge or connections.
Decide on Budget
May be the most crucial part of planning is the budget, depending on which you will count your return on investment. The ideal way is to offer a financial limit in definite areas of earnings, including sponsorship, ticket sales, as well as expenses like printing, location, food, supplies and security.
Decide on a Venue
The location and the venue sometimes play a key role in increasing attendance. A location where attendees can easily reach is the most preferable option. For example, you can select a location near the airport, central station or the city center.
Book the venue for your conference depending on the number of attendees you are expecting. Good hotels come with very professional conference rooms which are ideal, as they provide workforce as well as a good infrastructure. Do not forget to scrutinize your venue well in advance in order to avoid unpleasant surprises later.
Speaker and Program
Good topics and speakers are the main attraction of any type of conference. Thus, schedule good speakers at an early stage to ensure the success of your event. Make sure to include as many big names as you can. Speakers are crowd-pullers and acceptance from one good speaker helps you get approval from other famous speakers.
Next, you need to set a jam-packed agenda even before you start promoting your conference. This is because speakers and the program schedule will be your main way of drawing attention.
Promote your Conference
The aim of promoting your conference is mainly to gain more volume of new attendees and invite the existing ones. You can use online event management solutions to make things easy for you. Besides offline promotion using relevant newspapers and magazines, you can get more attention by using online ways. Publish your event page with your corporate look, send automated invitations to last year attendees, post conference calendar on your website, involve social network websites like Facebook and post your conference in local event listings, conference calendars and relevant blogs and directories. Use powerful communications and calendaring features to intensify marketing and promotional activities. Use email communications, discount rules and gift cards to promote and sell your event online.
Online Registration for Your Conference
Easy to use solution with professional approach is what attendees wish when they go for registering for your conference. Use online event registration and payment solution to streamline your ticketing and payment processing. Completely customizable registration forms with auto fill facility protect and save attendee data. The built-in questionnaire adds value to the registration process. You get to know all the required information and their preference which you can use to ensure attendee satisfaction. This online registration form can be hosted in your event website where you can allow one person to register and pay for a group of people by event or by booking option. Your event website is not only an online registration form but also an online advertisement of the agenda, speaker, directions and some hotel recommendations where your attendees can stay during the conference.
Use online payment management solution so that you can offer your registrant the ease of secure payment transaction that support real-time authorization and processing for all major credit cards, PayPal, Purchase Orders and checks.
Finally, when 'The Day' comes, you get ready with a check-in list and bar coded name badges that you have created using the registrant data. If you use online event management software for your conference, along with numerous benefits, you can use the dashboard for generating reports on post-event results. You can also send targeted emails to conduct post-event surveys to know honest opinion of your attendees so that you can plan more successful conference next time. Use these tips for planning your conference, and you will see how you increase ROI and lessen your workload.
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