How to Plan Events Like a Pro: 4 Best Event Management Practices

Event management is a stressful job. It requires a great deal of planning, coordination, and attention to detail to ensure everything goes just as planned. Those countless tasks, daunting deadlines and the growing expectations of your guests can take their toll on you, leaving you stressed out. It’s no wonder why Event Coordinator was rated as the 5th most stressful job in 2017 according to the Annual CareerCast.com 2017 report. To put this into perspective, the report rated the jobs of military personnel (1st), firefighter (2nd), airline pilot (3rd), and police officer (4th) as more stressful to that of event coordinator.  

So, how do you beat the stress and emerge victorious in the face of challenging event management assignments? Event management experts at Asana believe event coordinators can reduce the mounting stress of their job simply by incorporating the following best practices.

Assign Tasks, Set Deadlines and Ensure Timely Follow-up

A successful event is only as good as its planning. Major tasks at any event consist of securing the most suitable venue within the allocated budget and getting quotes from vendors well in advance in order to choose only the best of everything. But, it’s not as easy as it may sound, especially for bigger events with hundreds of guests. Regardless of the size of the event, the best planners usually map out their event plan wherein they assign the tasks to several team members and hold them accountable to deadlines.

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Split Bigger Tasks into Smaller Steps

As the event inches closer to its scheduled date, event coordinators often tend to get overwhelmed by unfinished tasks and tight deadlines. However, event management experts advise that you should break the larger goals into small steps and sub-tasks, and plan to tackle each task as per the deadline. When everyone in your team is assigned to each of those sub-tasks such as securing the venues, coordinating with vendors, and preparing keynotes, things start to look less dreadful and become easier to manage. More importantly, you should trust your teammates and allow them to finish the assigned tasks before the set deadline, instead of wasting time trying to micromanage everything on your own.

Make Meetings More Productive and Purposeful

Meetings can be a necessary evil or an effective approach to better event management, depending on what happens before, after and during the meetings. Without a robust planning or predefined agenda, meetings can actually be a productivity killer. But they don’t have to be. The most important thing to do before a meeting is called is set an agenda so everybody comes prepared with their status updates, and makes productive contributions to the discussion. The modern collaborative tools also make it easy for you to keep everybody clued-up before come to the meeting, which results in time-boxed and discussions.

Use Event Management Apps

Smart event coordination is all about spending less time in discussing the tasks and more time in accomplishing them in a timely fashion. The complexity of events demands better teamwork and coordination. By using bleeding-edge event management apps such as Whova, Asana, Trello, Smartsheet, Slack, Basecamp, AllSeated, Evvnt, IFTTT,  and Google Drive, event managers can stay on top of every detail and deadline. These apps save a great amount of time and let you focus on the real tasks at hand by helping your team stay in touch, share updates, and coordinate with one another in real time.

Final Thoughts

The US event industry is huge – according to statistics, it directly contributes an eye-popping $115 billion to the country’s GDP every year. With ever increasing interests, event management is a lucrative as well as a demanding job at the same time. With the right approach, tools, and planning, event managers can “plan” a thriving career in this industry.

How do you manage your events and what tools do you find useful in managing events better?