How to Tackle Corporate Event Planning Challenges

Worried that despite your best efforts your event is heading sideways? Event planners are crisis managers by training and experience – and sometimes big challenges arise that threaten to derail the whole experience for your guests. Relax and check out these 6 things you can do to prevent common corporate event planning challenges before, during and after your event.

Before:

1. Short event lead times. Can’t get your event budget approved early enough? It’s a common challenge today. With tighter event budgets, companies can be reluctant to commit to an event 12-18 months in advance. Don’t despair and set up as much as you can in advance. Make tentative bookings for your venue, accommodations and suppliers if you are able, and keep your key decision makers informed as you get closer to deadline. Vendors will extend you some leeway especially if you’ve worked with them before. It’s a good idea to develope a detailed outline of your event plan in advance so that you can pull things together quickly when the go-ahead is finally given. If you’re working on a recurring event, this is made even easier with good event planning software, no need to reinvent the wheel each year.
2. Your event website isn’t ready yet. Or unexpected web costs threaten to blow the budget. To get rolling, everything hangs on your event site being impressive, highly functional, cost effective, and ready to go live well in advance of your event. Don’t be held hostage by delayed development timelines, glitches, and rising costs. Event technology has come a long way and there are now beautiful event website templates you can customize in house, providing a seamless event registration experience too. You might be partial to these gorgeous new Attendease event templates.

During:

3. A speaker cancels at the last minute. What are you going to do with the 200 people who signed up for their session? One suggestion is to take a look at your group of presenters (who are already coming to your event anyway) and see who could be upgraded from a smaller space to a larger one, or who could do a breakout session in addition to their keynote. Another idea is to create a last-minute panel of experts made up of high profile guests and other speakers, then host a question and answer session with them on a popular topic. Either way, event scheduling changes can be easily and immediately updated for attendees with flexible scheduling on their mobile devices using an event app. 
4. Your presenter is losing the attention of the crowd. Subject matter experts don’t always make great speakers, so you’re careful who you book for your event. Positive word of mouth is a great way to find effective speakers, and don’t be shy to ask speakers for details about their presentations in advance. Handouts and slides should be supplied of course, but also ask about audience participation techniques and post-event follow-up. Great speakers will have it all planned out and be ready to share their plans with you.

After:

5. Losing track of important leads. Exporting data from from one spreadsheet or app to another can lead to lost contacts. Wherever people are in your pipeline, don’t make lead tracking an afterthought of event management. Use seamless event management tools that easily integrate all your detailed event data with your CRM software such as Hubspot and Salesforce 
6. Event analytics are needed NOW. Worried that you didn’t collect the right data right from the start? Worried that you can’t demonstrate the ROI from your event? It’s easy to track, measure and analyze your event success using modern event management software. Event analytics will provide you with actionable information and deep attendee insights about how your targeted and actual attendees are interacting with all of your marketing efforts.

Attendease is a cloud-based marketing automation solution for corporate event managers and teams. A modern, feature-rich event management software that enables the management of an entire range of events of all types and sizes.