The Great Event Escape: Overcoming Common Pitfalls

What are the most common pitfalls among event planners? Here's what I found. I just did a quick search today and here's some of the ones that I found.?

#1: Understaffing: you can't run an event by yourself.?

#2: Overspending. Especially with production overruns. We make a lot of mistakes because we underestimate the consequence of production.?

#3: Networking: Not integrating networking to your event.?

#4: No backup plans.?

#5: No wiggle room in the agenda

How do we solve these issues?

The number one thing that I recommend for event planners is we've got to learn the art of what pastor Craig Groeschel calls pre-deciding–deciding in advance how we're going to show up and how we're going to behave when something doesn't go the way that we thought it was going to go.

A lot of people will say, you've got to be a duck. By that we mean to let things roll off your back and also to show calm on your face while your mind is working furiously inside on how to solve the problem–like the duck’s feet are doing under the water.

Well, you can't simply decide to act like a duck. In the moment, you can't say, “Oh, I'll be a duck.” If something goes wrong, you actually have to practice. You have to practice and it takes years of experience.?

I was talking to my wife and she directs the children's ministry at our church. She realized she’s experienced almost anything that you can imagine after decades of being in the trenches, setting up, and leading volunteers. Event planners who've been doing this for decades, they have learned that things are just not going to always go according to plan and we can decide, are we going to respond with a smile or get frustrated and start blaming people?

Said another way: Are we going to pre-decide that we're going to stay calm in that moment and then fix the problem because events are live organisms? Events are like a dynamic organization that is moving and living and breathing and we've got to respond in the moment. But one of the things we can do is anticipate problems.

So that's called pre planning or pre-deciding what are we going to do when certain kinds of things go wrong? And what I like to do, and I learned this first from John R. DiJulius III in the DiJulius group, when it comes to customer service, but I think this applies to every aspect of an event.

Walk through your event, step by step, stage by stage of the customer journey and of your journey and look, what could go wrong here? What could go wrong at registration? What could go wrong at the welcome experience? What could go wrong at the opening keynote? Walk your way through the event stage by stage and make a list of the most significant things that could go wrong. Focus on the most significant problems.

Then decide how you’ll respond. Here's an example. You've possibly heard me tell this story, but? it's worth repeating because I think it illustrates it well. in? 2016, we were moving from a single hotel to a citywide event. And we said, what's one of the things that could go wrong that could really undermine the event?

Well, one of those things was a lot of people could leave the building in the middle of the day and never come back. And we said that would undermine the energy of the event. We asked why would they ever leave in the first place? And we found three common things that might cause them to leave.

One of the reasons was they might want to go get some work done in a quiet place. Number two, we thought, they might want to just go kick their feet up and take a nap before they come back and engage in the rest of the day. And number three, they might need to go brush their teeth. Well, we figured we could solve the first two easily.

We created a space where they can work, making sure they've had access to at least modest WiFi. Number two, we can create what we ended up calling a quiet zone where there would be places to kick their feet up, with some soft lounge chairs, some beanbags, low lights, and soft music.

And then third, what are you going to do if they need to brush their teeth? Well, what we've done for years and tried to do is have some way that they could get a mint or maybe brush their teeth or have some mouthwash. All those things can add up to a way that they can solve that problem. And now They don't have to leave.

Now, what was great was one year Malene who is from Denmark came up to our team and she said, “Hey, I, I need to purchase a toothbrush. Where's the closest place that I can buy one?” Well, that year we had baskets of toothbrushes in the bathroom. So we were able to show her that we had toothbrushes, toothpaste, mouthwash, dental floss, all the things for taking care of your oral hygiene.

She was blown away. She in fact went and bought her ticket for the next year and started evangelizing our event because this is the event that thinks of everything. Now I will promise you, we don't think of everything. No event planner can think of everything. We try to think about what are the most significant problems that people might have and how will we solve them?

And the rest of them, you just keep a smile on and you remain flexible and you try to make somebody's day.?

You Are Not Your Ideal Client

Now here's the second thing that I think a lot of event planners fall into, including me. Get to know your audience and she doesn't look like you. Now it might be a man, it might be a woman.

I'm saying she, because our audience typically is a woman and she's younger than me and her musical and cultural preferences are different from my own. For years, I planned the music for the conference and thought everyone loves jazz as background, networking music. Why wouldn't they?

I mean, here I am. I'm a professional saxophonist. Why wouldn't, why wouldn't they want to hear me play? And, you know, for years they wouldn't tell me. Because the band sounded good. We're good, but it wasn't the right music for the audience. And I was planning an event that I would enjoy going to. I wasn't planning an event for the people walking through the door.

So now I've learned, and I think this is something all planners have to learn eventually is who is their customer. What do they look like? What, I mean, obviously it's not a person, but what are the collective interests that they have and what kind of experience are they looking forward to and how can we cater to that?

And the larger the event, you may need several different avatars because they don't all fit into one neat box.?

Production Budget Overruns

Now let's talk about production budgeting. This one is a moving target, and this is one where you can get caught off guard by rising costs, and it typically has to do with labor. If you're in a union facility, it can be even trickier because the stewards have a lot more say in what they're going to charge you for and what they're not going to charge you for.

But it behooves you to have great relationships and to do as well as you can in anticipating those costs. This is one of those places that cost overruns can happen and they can surprise you. I remember in the early years, I was shocked when I learned that there were 10 people on the clock in our keynote room. When we did a rehearsal and it went over by 30 minutes, they charge us an extra hour. That hour cost thousands of dollars and no one had ever shown us the math.

That was a wake up call. And so we really try hard to manage expectations and to work within the limits and communicate well with our production company.

Baking Networking Into Your Event

This deserves a whole article. Networking is something that everybody comes for, Today, post pandemic, when we go to a conference, we're not just going for the content. We pay for the content, but we're going because we want to be with our friends and to make new friends and discover new resources and insights.

We want to learn from our friends. But if an event just throws a party together, adds a bar and calls it a networking party, that's not really a networking party. And so we've got to design it in such a way that people can easily meet people, have significant conversations, and find the people that they're really looking for. That requires planning.

Contingency Planning for Weather

Not having a backup plan for weather is another common pitfall. It doesn't matter where you are in the world; weather can go bad. Weather can go awry. We've been in San Diego for years and San Diego is known for beautiful weather. It's America's finest city, but I think probably half the time we've been there, it's rained at some point during our event.

And what are you gonna do? How are you going to respond? And you've got to make sure your partners are on board, all of your vendors, all of your staff, keeping an eye on the forecasts and the sky. We've been blessed to have Jennifer Watson, from the Weather Channel, coming to our event for years. And she always gives us a heads up on what the weather forecast is, but it can change, it can sometimes change overnight, even if you have a reasonable forecast a few days out.

What are your backup plans? What are you going to do for food and for seating? People may need transportation if it’s too wet. Can taxis and rideshare drives access your space easily? Do you need umbrellas on hand? If you're in Orlando, you've got to be ready for that.

Create Flexibility in Your Schedule

The last thing is so many events plan their schedule minute by minute. And there's not much wiggle room. There's not much flex in the schedule. It’s important to add some margin to your schedule.

I love having 30 minute breaks between sessions because it allows time if something goes over, or if something goes wrong, if there's a technology problem, you've got a plan in place. And then bring your emcees on board in particular. If you've got emcees, make sure that they're professionally trained and that they are ready to respond because sometimes things just don't go the way you expected.

Maybe a speaker's running late or the technology isn't working the way that you thought it should. And sometimes you don't know for several minutes if you need to pull the plug and delay the session or if you just need to stall. And so make sure that your emcees can engage the audience, keep them present, keep them excited and energized, and then clearly communicate what the plan is if you're needing to reschedule or delay the start of a session.

There was one year we had to delay by 15 minutes. So we said, Hey, look, we're going to do this session again at lunch tomorrow. If you really wanted to be here for this session, we apologize that it didn't go the way we thought. Come back tomorrow at noon.

Have flexibility and look for alternatives. If your staff is ready, if you've got that duck mindset, letting things just roll off your back, you put on a smile and you say, okay, what else can we do? Then you're going to solve it. Your attendees will love it. You're going to make somebody's day. And that might just lead to a moment of transformation.