Investing in Experiences: Heading Your Own Event

Last week, I wrote about the  4 reasons why you should attend seminars and so, today I want to focus on how to head your very own event or summit. As an advocate of financial literacy, I have experienced coming up with activities -- big and small -- that focuses on improving financial awareness on students, inside and outside our Alma mater. And just last December, I had the chance to head the first DLSU-D Students' Summit. It was a fund raising fund raising summit attended by almost 2200 students from all over Cavite and Laguna. And from my experience, heading any kind of event consist of 3 basic parts which are the Pre-Event, Event Proper and Post-Event.

Photo by Camille Trinidad, Heraldo Filipino DLSU-D

1. Pre-event - Organizing your own event will take a lot of preparations, especially if its scope is large. In my opinion, a large summit or conference needs about 3-4 months for preparation. You might think that's too far ahead but trust me, you will need all the prep time you can get! Pre-event involves the basic parts such as Planning and Logistics, Costing, Marketing, Sales and Sponsorship.

Planning and logistic will be the first step. This is where you come up with your theme, event logo, as well as inviting speakers and personalities to your event. It also involves venue reservations, and finalizing proposals and papers especially if your organization is under an office or department. The theme and logo is especially important because the theme will be the overall essence of the all event. All the topics and talk must be in line with it. The Logo in the other hand will be the permanent symbol or brand for the event. It will be used for ALL of the letters and publicity materials. Basically this will be the image that will stick to your attendees.

Costing the event should also be one of your top priorities. You need to have a workable budget and an idea of how much you would likely spend for the whole event. This is helpful especially if you will be setting up a sale mark up to your ticket prices. This will help you track if your event will make profit or not. I suggest using excel and forming "scenarios" of different total participants and deducting the projected expenses to see how many tickets sales are needed to break-even.

It is also important to allot sufficient time for the Sponsorship. My advise to you is to create a specific team that will solely focus in all sponsorship matters. They will be tasked to prepare letters to sponsors and create a sponsorship package indicate the range of monetary or in kind values together with the corresponding benefits for each sponsors benefits or what you are willing to give in exchange of their help (e.g. company logo included in the publicity materials, brand mentioning during the event and playing company commercials during breaks, etc.)

While your sponsorship team is moving, another team should be set up to head Marketing and Sales. Marketing will be tasked to come up with posters, maintain the social media accounts for the event and teasers. They can also be task to communicate and send invitations to potential participants for the event. Sales will involve  the actual selling of tickets. I personally think, that the more payment methods, the better especially if your organizing a large event. The methods I can think of are setting up ticket booths, creating a bank account were participants can deposit their payments or giving participants an option to selling tickets online thru various online ticketing sites.

2. Event Proper - this will the actual day of the event. This part involves registration up to the evaluation of the event. A typical conferences program flow may look this:

• 08:00 – 09:00 Registration
• 09:00 – 09:05 Invocation and National Anthem
• 09:05 – 09:10 Welcome Remarks
• 09:10 – 09:15 Recognition of Sponsors
• 09:15 – 09:20 Introduction of Speaker
• 09:20 – 10:00 “1st talk"
• 10:00 – 10:10 Q&A
• 10:10 – 10:15 Introduction of Speaker
• 10:15 – 10:55 “2nd talk"
• 10:55 – 11:05 Q&A
• 11:05 – 11:10 Introduction of Speaker
• 11:10 – 11:50 “3rd talk"
• 11:50 – 12:00 Q&A
• 12:00 – 12:50 Lunch Break
• 12:50 – 12:55 Recognition of Sponsors
• 12:55 – 01:00 Introduction of Speaker
• 01:00 – 02:20 “4th talk"
• 02:20 – 02:50 Q&A
• 02:50 – 02:55 Introduction of Speaker
• 02:55 – 03:35 “5th talk"
• 03:35 – 03:45 Q&A
• 03:45 – 03:50 Introduction of Speaker
• 03:50 – 04:30 “6th talk"
• 04:30 – 04:40 Q&A
• 04:40 – 04:45 Closing Remarks
• 04:45 – 05:00 Recognition of Sponsors/Closing Ceremony

During large-scale events such as summit, you will need a lot of manpower. For me, events like this might need 50 or more people and if your a little short on committees, you can delegate event proper task to your pre-event committee. That way your people and multitask and reduce representation costs. Common committees need for the event proper would be:

• Registration Committee - tasked for the participants registration
• Food Committee - distribution of food to the participants, sponsors
• Backstage Committee - tasked of managing the arrival and departure and food for the speakers and guests, among others.
• Ushers - Participants' Area - to make sure the participates and taken care of.
• Ushers - Sponsorship Area - to make sure the sponsorship area remains orderly.
• Program Committee - to make sure the program flow will be followed accordingly.
• Technical Committee - tasked to manage sounds and lighting
• Runners - will be the ones to go around the venue to communicate or deliver important messages to each committess
• Evaluation and Certificate Committees - task to distribute evaluation forms and certificates foe the event.
• Documentation - tasked to document the event proper.

3. Post-event the last step in the process. Most people might think that an event ends when the closing ceremony is complete and the participants have already left the venue but it doesn't! the Post-event involves assessing feedback, financial statements preparation (for events with money involved), sending letters of appreciation to your guest and sponsors and may a small thanksgiving party to your whole team.

It is important to tally the evaluation of your participants because it will summarize the review and maybe some of the shortcomings of the event. This way you will be able to address the problems in the events to come. It is important to properly tally the cost and revenue and see if your event ended with a profit or loss. During our summit, I'm really proud that we were able to donate funds for the university scholarship fund, the accountancy scholarship fund and emergency fund to a sister school.

Lastly, make sure to extend your appreciation to all the speakers, sponsors and committees that helped you achieve a successful event. You may do so by sending a letter of appreciation. In our organization, we organization a small thanksgiving party and of course, a thanks giving mass t thank the Lord for the strength and guidance he has given us.

Overall, heading a event is hard but it is worth it. It gave me so much experience in working and communicating with other people and it truly tested my decision -making and time-management skill. In the end, I can truly say that I came out stronger and more level-headed after this event. I hope that for all of you readers, who are new members of an organization or are tasked to head a particular event, can use this article as a guide. 

This is Jernica on investing in experiences!

Do you have any questions or suggestions on what I should talk about next? Comment them below! Also, I would love to hear your thoughts/ Hope you can follow me on twitter @TheInvestingPOV

'Til next week!

Cheers!

Disclaimer: Credits to Ms. Camille Trinidad of Heraldo Filipino, DLSU-D for the photo. The article is based on my personal experiences and opinions on how to handle events.