5 Tips for Creating a Successful Event

Whether you're putting together a conference, a charity event or a brand new inspirational festival, there are certian things you need to do to make sure it's a success. Today's guest blogger, Jemina Lehmusoki, comes to us all the way from Helsinki, Finland, where she is co-producing a brand new one-day festival called INSPIRE. To help you with your next event, she's written this post on what she learned in the process. Enjoy – Mike McClure, Editor.

Five things I've learned while working on INSPIRE

INSPIRE is a new city festival in Helsinki, Finland featuring all the many ways we find inspiration: music, storytelling, food, dance and more. It's organized by a group of students in the interdisciplinary Master's Program of IDBM in Aalto University. While working together as a group of volunteers to launch this first time event has been fun and exciting, it's also been challenging at times. None of us were experts in organizing events when the project started, but we quickly learned and continue to learn. Here are some of the things that I, as a co-producer of the event, have picked up for projects in the future:

 

1) It's never too early to start talking. When you are organizing an event where you hope to get sponsors and guest performers to pitch in, the right time to start asking around is yesterday. We began the project only four months before the selected date. We knew that was kinda crazy. Luckily the response has been really positive with most people and organizations we've talked with, and the event is coming out pretty awesome. But if we hadstarted earlier, we could have saved quite a bit in costs and been able to reach all the people we wanted to.

2) Get your story straight. You might know what your event is all about, but others don't until you tell them. At first, we found it hard to start telling people about the event, because we didn't know exactly what it was going to be or how we would make things happen. So, we sat down with a couple of people who had more experience than us in building events, and practiced our pitch on them. They helped us hone our message. The important thing is to get started. You just need to start with something. It's ok to change your message during the process as you further develop it. You also want to make sure that the whole team knows how to talk about the event in the same way, so that you're not confusing people. Sharing the message and getting people to understand why your event is important is key.

3) Creating buzz is hard work. You would think that recording a cool video and posting it on Vimeo is enough. But the truth is that for a video to go viral you need to do a bit of planning. People may see your posts and think that they're cool, but not many of them actually hit 'like' and even fewer share the message with others. I've had people come and tell me face-to-face how amazing the event sounds, but those same guys have not given a single thumbs-up on our Facebook page or shared any of our content. So, you need to make sure that all of the organizers are active in spreading the word: it's much more effective if you have ten people posting about the same news than if it's only the event page doing so.

  

4) Always plan your photo- and video shoots beforehand. It's not sufficient that you have a storyline in mind, if you have not put together a list of the scenes that you need to shoot. You will be wasting everybody's time if you haven't checked out the location beforehand, and you'll have to re-take material later on if you don't know what you're looking for. So, make sure you have a basic script in mind, outline of the video and do a location scout ahead of time. You should also have a single person responsible for directing the shots. We had wonderful and talented guys filming us on a couple of occasions for our teaser, and if we had prepared better it would have made their job easier.

5) Let your excitement show. As I said, none of us had experience in organizing a festival before. Things could have started to go terribly wrong, since on many occasions we honestly had no clue what we were doing. However, a lot of people have been willing to help us out in whatever way they can. Why? Because t they've seen how important the event is to us organizers and how excited we are about making it happen. It's fun to work with someone who is genuinely excited about their project. Make it easy for people to join in and lend a hand. Get them excited and make them feel glad that they did.

Do all of these things and you will be on your way to creating a successful event!

 

Jemina Lehmusoki  Co-Producer INSPIRE