How To Make Perfect Planning For Events in Malaysia
What is an Event Plan?
Regardless of the event format, be it a business partner meeting, a conference, a trade fair, a ceremony or a party, you need a centralised event plan to help steer you and your team towards a shared aim.
Simply put, an event plan is a strategy document that details all the aspects and elements of an event.
Key Elements of Event Planning (Step by Step)
We understand that organising an event can be a tedious job and accomplishing your goals with the event is even tougher. No worries as we’ve gathered here these 4 key components of event planning that, if followed, will ensure the success of your event.
1. Event Preparation
Your event planning process should always start off with market research, followed by writing an event plan—documenting budgets, finalising event venues, drafting timelines, researching suppliers like caterers or staff members and securing sponsorship.
2. Event Promotion
This covers all of the elements that help to market the event, raise awareness and up-scale the number of attendees. Email, social media, partnerships, word of mouth, SEO, advertising, blog, direct mail, PR and discount campaigns are some of the channels you may consider using.
3. On-site Event Management
To ensure the big day (or days) goes without a hitch and that everyone is where they need to be, you need to put out any onsite fires. Even before the event, you need to already have a contingency plan ready in case anything goes out plan.
4. Post-event Review
From event breakdown to reconciling of budgets, sending thank you messages to everyone involved, share event highlights on media, distributing surveys and a wash-up meeting, these are the post-event processes to go through. Lastly, refine and adjust for your next event.
How is Planning Important for an Event?
To pull off a successful event, physical or virtual, we must focus on the planning stage, which is the most crucial step in achieving the specified goals. In fact, proper planning for events can help in carrying out a variety of critical functions, including:
- Assists in obtaining authorisation for the event to take place
- Provides all stakeholders with a road map for the event
- Ensures that you examine all important perspectives during preparation
- Make sure that nothing is overlooked
- Provides support throughout the event
- Helps you make a decision during the event
- Provides a solid framework for crew briefings
What are the steps in the planning process? (Step by Step)
To get you started with event planning, here are the 9 simple steps to follow.
- Develop Your Event Goal & Objectives
Establishing a tangible goal and objective when planning for events is the very first step to take. Know why you are organising this event and be clear of what you hope to accomplish will make your following steps easier to deal with.
- Build A Event Planning Team
In order to manage all of the specifics for an event, a dedicated team effort is required. Consider appointing a core committee member as the event chair, as well as individual chairpersons for subcommittees. Subcommittees could cover, for example, location, speakers, talents, publicity, sponsors, transportation, volunteer management, and so on.
- Select The Right Venue
For the event venue, consider if there are good transport links to the place so that it is convenient for you and your attendees. For virtual events, do some research on the platform providers to ensure that it matches your budget, brand, preferred dates and anything else crucial to deliver an immersive experience.
- Pick A Date & Time
To set a date, remember to give yourself sufficient time as event preparation. Ideally, you should have at least 4 to 6 months to plan, subject to the nature of your event. Apart from that, double-check the calendar to find out if there are any clashes with other large events or celebrations such as the big bank holidays and religious holidays.
If you’re booking a venue, don’t forget to call and check for the slot available. When inviting key participants like speakers, VIP guests or stakeholders, it will be good if you could check dates with them in advance.
- Brand Your Event
By giving a unique name to your event, it will easily be etched in your target audience’s mind. Yet, do ensure that it is clear and descriptive enough so it’s easy for people to know what your event is about.
Designing an event tagline and a logo can work as well. Both are effective branding tool that can be used on banners, event t-shirts, goodie bags, etc.
- Determine Administrative Processes
Plan ahead. Think and decide on how you and your team will be using to keep track of your planning, registration, budget, guests, and speakers lists. Consult tech experts and learn more about the event planning system they offer. You ought to layout the lead capture mechanism for later use.
- Engage Partnership & Sponsorship
The two major benefits of having a partnership or a sponsorship are to defray the costs and boost potential participation. Hence, you might want to consider calling on corporate sponsors to fund a portion of the event. Or, you could collaborate with partners who can offer an event venue or manpower to run the event.
- Create A Publicity Plan
To get people to join, you need to bring your event in front of their eyes. You may use both online and offline methods such as your event landing page, blog page, newsletters, events calendars, printed programs, media relations and social media to encourage registration.
- Evaluate Your Event
Do conduct organising debriefs with the team after the event. Present those data collected and comparing these data to the original event goals and numbers.
How to host a successful event?
The world of event management has changed significantly over the last few years, with newer technologies gaining ground and making things better. The emergence of different event software has made tasks a lot easier when deployed in event planning; one can even gain an edge over his competitors.
Aside from using these technologies to achieve set goals, it is important to analyse one’s strengths and weaknesses as an event planner. Every event planner has a differing degree of strengths and weaknesses. There are things that I value so much that do not matter to you. There are clients you would consider a perfect fit but would naturally drive me crazy.
Hence, take some time to learn about the personality you should have as a professional event planner will give you a much better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses during event planning. Subsequently, you, too, can improve your relationship with clients and vendors.
Strengths in Event Planning
These are expressly the attributes of your project which are critical in achieving objectives.
Some examples:
- Experienced event team
- Excellent PR
- High motivation level
- Usage of the right event marketing tools
- Good market share, strong brand name
- Many social media followers
Weaknesses in Event Planning
These attributes are harmful to your project and may impede you from achieving your set goals.
Some examples:
- Social loafing
- Inexperienced event team
- Lack of funds
- Low energy level
- Small social follower base
- Lack of media and corporate contacts
- Little or no brand recognition
- Small budget
A lot of people think they “know it all,” but in most cases, they are not aware of the field they are in.
However, with a due reflection on your strengths and weaknesses in event planning and external opportunities—and possible threats—you could protect yourself from missing out, and in certain cases against a bad event.
How to plan an event from start to finish? (Step by Step)
Before you get your event planning Malaysia project off the ground, bear in mind that an event plan should be crafted in a creative way yet still making it simple to follow.
You do not want to draft a 20-page document and let it gather digital dust in some unloved folder a week later. Hence, if you need a guide to start off, here’s a template for creating a winning event plan.
- The Essentials
This section, also called the top bun of a burger, includes the event name, date, location and purpose. It gives the brief of the event you wish to host—the what, when, where and why.
- Needs
Identify your attendees’ core needs to proceed. What do they crave? Well, it could be the updates on the latest industry trends, entertainment to relax on weekends, opportunities for people to get involved in helping those in need, etc.
- Solutions
Once the needs are determined, start thinking about how your event can be planned to satisfy those needs, in terms of the event type, event format, scale and so on. Ponder carefully on what your event can offer and to what extend your event can match attendees’ needs. Give your attendees the reason why they should choose your event over everything else they could spend their time and money on.
This is about describing the key benefits of your events. For instance, you will have the best speakers in the industry to share their unique insights or the best bands in a particular music genre.
- Unfair Advantages
Your solutions could be general but think of what resources you have in hand that would make it difficult for your competitors to replicate. Do join more social events to connect with people of varied fields. They might possibly be your next potential collaborator.
For example, if you are going to host a conference, you will have a higher chance of securing more senior speakers than other conferences due to the relationships you have long built with them.
- Unique Value Proposition
To create a compelling unique value proposition, gather all the highlights of your event and make an exciting and memorable tagline of it. It should be something catchy and that no one has done that in the past.
Make it exclusive, for example, the only event your attendees get to meet and connect with the top 10 industry leaders. Or, an event that allows your attendees to be the very first to experience new products.
- Audience
The essential demographics of the audience your event would want to focus on. Determine exactly who you are targeting for this specific event. Whether they are the single Millenials (aged 21-40) with disposable income but active on social media or people who are an avid environmentalist.
- Marketing Channels
Do not split your marketing channels into too many branches. Focus on only 3-5 so that you can have a sufficient budget to boost your event in each channel. Choose the channel based on who your target audience is and where they are more active.
For formal business meetings, use email, direct mail and paid social media; for festivals, utilise sponsors, social media and display ads.
- Key Metrics
Tie back your key metrics with the predetermined event purpose. Common key metrics include the profit/revenue, the average ticket price, membership growth, the total funds raised, the number of participants, the press mentions and so on.
- Event Costings
Here we come to the event budget that details your headline costs. Ensure everyone in your event planning team is on the same page as to what they can and can’t spend, and where they will need to make savings.
This includes the venue rental/platform charges, AV & equipment, insurance, talent fees, marketing, branding and printing, food and beverages as well as the door gifts (optional).
- Revenue Model
Document how you will be balancing the books and how much you expect to receive in return. Draft the percentage whether is a 50-50 (tickets-sponsorships), 60-30-10 (entrance fees-donations-sponsorships) or any other division.
How Evenesis helps in event planning?
Evenesis embraces the latest technology in event planning Malaysia software to enhance your event planning experience. Everything in one system, Evenesis can keep you and your team on top of the game while saving you time.
Think, and be successful with Evenesis – the most powerful ticketing platform for all your event needs. Sign up today!