Event management is an interesting field of work that carries its own set of challenges. Since events are a collective functioning of multiple activities together, event planners face a variety of issues at work.
The success of any event is divided into four steps: planning, design, promotion, and execution. Each step brings out thousands of other issues which, if left unattended, will result in more subsequent issues and the failure of an event.
Since there are no ways to eliminate these issues, event planners have to face them head-on, find solutions, strive towards the success of the event, and their own growth. Here is a list of the eight most common event challenges that every event planner must face, and our motive is to help you get accustomed to these unwanted situations and intelligently handle them.
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Plan from start to finish
Planning is the most crucial stage for an event. Without a proper plan, organizers most often collide with unwanted situations that they could have easily avoided. Planning is the step where the team needs to put a significant amount of time and show synchronized team efforts.
Most organizers are so pumped for the event that they rush through the planning stage and decide to take a challenge head-on. While it may sound heroic, but as the team gets more involved with the event preparation activities, they get less interested in solving a problem that takes more of their time and effort.
Planning is half the job done.
If the entire team works to plan for an event from start till the end, around every possibility of a problem, the team can swiftly come out of the problem. Planning also helps to coordinate all major and minor activities that serve the long-term goal.
Tracking of money and the budget
The second biggest challenge every event planner comes across is keeping track of the spending. Event preparation includes many activities, some of which have a monetary value while some don’t, and keeping a track of all the expenses becomes complex, especially when you have a larger team.
To avoid this situation, it is best to estimate the expense for every activity in your event preparation. And this can only be achieved when you have carefully crafted your event plans from start to end.
Calculate your expenses, assign your budget, set a reasonable bar for expenses, use a tool to monitor the expenses, and hire a finance manager to help you in governing the budget. If you implement all the steps above, you can save yourself time and work on event execution.
Assigning responsibilities to your team members
Pre-event duties are many, and a single person can’t handle them. Every member of your team must be mentally prepared to take the heat and work efficiently to fulfill their responsibilities.
On the other hand, it is also important for the event manager to carefully assign responsibilities to the team members. You can’t assign a task to a member who is not skilled to perform the task. You have to understand your team, their weakness, their strengths, and the event requirement to assign them tasks.
So maintain clear communication always. Talk about the task at hand and repeat yourself. If the task is complex, make sure to double-check on the member. In case of an emergency, form a team who is responsible to act swiftly and resolve the problem. Have everything segregated and explained to your team so they are well-informed of their responsibilities day-in and out.
Plan B if your guest speaker bails out
This is a dreary situation for the entire organization and especially the event manager. The entire event is planned, promotions are done, and attendees have been registered, but the speaker bails out. Although this situation is rare, it is important that an event manager always has a backup.
Take this as a challenge and have the backup plan figured. In case, anything happens, implement the powerful backup.
Don’t forget the bigger picture
It is easy for any team member to lose track of the mission and focus more on short-term goals. Depending on the duration and complexity of a task, you may get influenced by the task at hand, and may not be ready to let go of it, thus affecting the following set of tasks.
The only way to avoid this is by not letting go of the bigger picture and analyzing if the task at hand is more beneficial than the event itself. While no task is as important as the event itself, analyze if the completion of the smaller task is beneficial or advantageous to the event. If not, you can always come back to the smaller task later.
Analyze the proposals quickly
If you have a bigger team, there will be many proposals for the event preparation or the topic or the agenda, or the format. While you must listen to all the ideas, make sure you don’t spend a lot of time brainstorming which idea to choose.
As an event manager, have a plan ready for the entire event. Take inputs from your team and analyze the ones that would enhance your plan and implement it. The more you spend time collecting ideas from your team, the more complex it will become for you to decide, thus delaying the entire event preparation process.
Be ready for software issues
One of the major things that we avoid to keep in your bucket list of lookouts is software issues. As most of the events are now conducted online, it is an integral part of an event manager to keep a close look at the functioning of all the software methods used. The failure of one software can cause the failure of the entire event, thus affecting the brand.
To overcome such situations, it is important that you use reliable event platforms like Goldcast that provide a solution centered on the specific type of events. Apart from this, event managers must focus more on assigning a team member responsible to check for outages before, during, and post-event.
Simplified workflow
Adjusting to workflows is not easy when dealing with event preparation. However, as an event manager, you must be ready for all odds. Suppose your team member falls sick or has an emergency, have your backup ready who can efficiently handle the task.
Most of the time, there can be odds that are neither listed in books nor you might have faced them earlier. You must have your backup team ready who are smart to handle situations and can support you in maintaining a simplified workflow.
Be ready for all the emergencies and learn more about your team before assigning them tasks.
Conclusion
An event manager might face situations that are not even listed above and looks overwhelming. But the important quality of an event manager is to remain calm and find an alternate solution to every problem. While the urgency of a situation might just create chaos, it is advised to always have a backup plan ready.
Treat all your challenges as learning and implement them to simplify future event preparations. As an event manager, you will have every resource at your disposal, but the important aspect you must focus on is keeping a positive mindset.
