Sometimes you just have to play the number game.
Whether you’re planning a corporate event, a training or an open house, there will be times that you need to estimate the size of your audience long before the RSVP’s or registration forms are due. You want to scream, but I don’t know how many people are coming!! Take a deep breath. At the end of the day, it’s all about comfort. Some of our clients estimate high because they’d rather have extras than worry about running out. Others tend to estimate low because budgets are tight and they have no storage space for leftovers. Estimating may not be fun, but we’ve come up with a few ways to relieve some of the pressure. By asking the right questions and considering both “too much” and “not enough” scenarios, you can sleep better knowing that your estimate might not be perfect, but you have a plan. 1. Can you easily add more? Hotels often ask for food counts three days ahead of time. If you’re expecting (or hoping for!) a lot of walk-in traffic, this can prove difficult. The good news is that many caterers will allow you to increase the amount of food up to the day of the event. They also may be able to provide meals for unexpected guests, if you are willing to be flexible about what they are served. Be sure to ask your conference location or caterer about their policy. 2. Can extra printed materials be delivered on demand ? If your training typically requires printed materials, ask if there is access to a short printer that can quickly deliver extras, if necessary. Or, determine whether materials and programs could be emailed to last-minute attendees. Most attendees have smart phones or tablets with them, making access to digital materials relatively easy. 3. Can extras be repurposed or used in the future? Nobody wants to be stuck with boxes of water bottles that will never be used or food that must be tossed away. Will the hotel donate leftovers to a local food pantry? Who gets the extra prewrapped snacks? Can you choose foods/snacks that will keep? Is there something else you can use the giveaway items for? Do you have space to store extra training binders until the next training is held? If you have space and future need for an item, ordering too much is not a problem. 4. Can evidence of a giveaway be removed? Once the free pens and notebooks are gone, remove the table that they were displayed on. Take down signage asking people to “please take one.” A few guests might notice that their friend received the freebie, but most won’t even be aware that they didn’t get a gigamawhick … unless you forget to take down the huge sign advertising it as a giveaway. If you run out of a popular item and can’t hide the evidence, you’ll get lots of questions and maybe even a few angry glares.
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Some of our favorite projects include those where most people don’t even know we’re involved. That was the case when H2M, a Fargo marketing agency, needed an extra hand to work on an advertising campaign. H2M had to identify locations where out-of-town videographers could film backdrops for a federal credit union commercial. When H2M asked Reach Partners to take on this part of the project, we had about a month to find 20 diverse locations that could each host a video team for 30 to 45 minutes. In addition, H2M asked us to schedule the locations to limit travel time between each site. Anita started calling – both places where she knew people and places where she didn’t. She soon had a list of locations and the times each site could be used. Then the work started. “The schedule was a big puzzle where I had to start inserting pieces and then move them around,” Anita says. Within six working days, she handed H2M a schedule and secured permissions from each location. In addition, she had traveled to each site and took photographs so the out-of-town videographers had some visual information ahead of time. “We were completely in the background with this project,” Anita says. “The H2M client didn’t even know we were involved.” Check out the commercials:
Interning at Reach Partners has been a wonderful experience, and I’m only one month into my internship. So far, I’ve been able to put knowledge and skills from my classes at Concordia College to the test. What I love about this experience is that Anita and Rachel give me independent tasks to work on that challenge me and engage me.
I can already see how my skills from classes overlap with my projects here at Reach Partners. Since I am a public relations student and have a minor in business, I have taken many courses at Concordia that involve event planning, social media and blogging, marketing, and public relations. I also have helped to plan and execute campaigns as part of my school work. I am thankful for these experiences because they help in my internship work, such as the Women’s Health Conference that Reach Partners helps plan and execute. I’ve been tasked to create a communication/marketing plan for the 2017 event. As part of my public relations and marketing courses at Concordia, I have helped design marketing and public relations campaigns for nonprofits in the Fargo-Moorhead community, including Haley’s Hope and Ellen Hopkins Elementary Nature Play Park. If it weren’t for these experiences, I would not have the skills to assist with the marketing and communication plans and strategies for the Women’s Health Conference. From planning events in my event planning course to running full social media, marketing and public relations campaigns in other courses, I have practiced skills that I will be using not only in my future career, but also in my current internship. The experiences from my class projects have given me the confidence to work independently on tasks at Reach Partners, which allows me to gain more skills and knowledge that will be beneficial in my future career. I am grateful that Anita and Rachel are confident in my abilities to allow me to work independently on projects. This not only helps them out with tasks, but allows me learn from them. -Olivia, Event Strategy Intern I am excited to introduce myself as the spring intern for Reach Partners. I am from the tiny town of Mahnomen, Minn., where everyone knows each other and where Minnesota goodbyes are a real thing. I am a senior at Concordia College, where I am finishing up my major in communication studies with an emphasis in public relations and a minor in Business.
I am involved in numerous activities at Concordia including Fall Orientation, Lambda Delta Sigma, Family Weekend, PR Club and other various community service projects. Being so involved in activities is what sparked my interest in event management, which is why I am looking forward to my internship with Reach Partners! I am excited to learn from Anita and Rachel and can't wait to put my skills to the test with hands-on experiences that will help me in my chosen field of study. I hope to work in event management after graduation. When I'm not at Reach Partners, chances are you can find me working in downtown Fargo at Kittsona, indulging in a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop, or binge-watching my favorite shows on Netflix! -Olivia, Event Strategy Intern It’s hard to know if the job’s done and successful without a plan. The planning stage of a project is vital to the successful outcome for the desired product or service. The plan identifies the process, players, benchmarks and goals and objectives essential to success. Follow the plan to keep on track and refer back to the plan when options seem to be too many or too few. If you lose weight without a plan, you and your doctor should be alarmed-there could be underlining health issues to sudden and unexplained weight loss. To be successful in making change to your body, you plan around your lifestyle: you plan to approach your next meal and the ones that follow; you plan to get up early to start and complete your next work-out and the succession of those that build strength and endurance. You plan to do the exercise that works for you, your fitness level and your body. You set the benchmarks for success based on your individual need. You think through the potential risks and pitfalls and you monitor and adjust to get yourself back on track when you slip. Your plan tells you when you’ve realized success and can celebrate. Same goes for your next project. Studies show we don’t operate well when we have to make many choices in a day. The considerable noise that surrounds us in everyday decision making forms a multitude of distraction to your project’s goal. Each of us has a multitude of responsibilities and demands; by relying on the plan as a filter, decisions can be made more quickly, if not with ease. Barry Schwartz‘s book The Paradox of Choice (here’s his TED talk) provides a pretty convincing argument that more is not better.
With a plan in place choices are naturally limited and focused on the end goal. A plan mitigates your exposure to choice so that you can focus attention and reason on the options that further the project. In your personal experience the same holds true, Szu-chi Huang says "People fail to realize that relatively rigid structures can often simplify goal pursuit by removing the need to make choices, especially when people are already well into the process.” A plan is a view into the future. It takes time to create a plan. Yet, the time invested in imagination, consideration and review can actually save time during project execution. At the most basic, the plan identifies realistic expectations in defined deliverables, approach, and scope, there is a project org-chart, and the team understands all their roles and responsibilities, a mechanism for planned communications, a detailed schedule, status and milestones. Unidentified risks can take a big bite into the budget, schedule and scope, so during the planning process the team is charged with imagining issues and the steps and funding needed to deescalate a problem. A plan is not static. Things change, and managing the changes is key to a successful project. Without change control, A key to a good plan are the formal change control procedures to assess and communicate changes to make sure the right people are involved in the decisions, communicate to manage expectations and avoid confrontations. Reach Partners defines a detailed plan for executing solutions. We organize the details and resource the steps along the way, ensuring your project stays on goal, on budget and on time. Nothing will work unless you do. Dreams, thoughts and vision are simply not enough to create something. Only through movement, effort and action can an idea form into existence. We can all acknowledge a moment when it’s hard to shift from vision to movement – to make that phone call, get out of bed for a run, move from thought to being.
Some of us are apt to think and contemplate thoroughly the perspectives and positions of the concept. Explorers of our own minds. Some are built to relish in quiet contemplation which later transforms the thing into something wondrous, profound and utterly right. When you sell out a day or two before an event you get one option: congratulate yourself on good budgeting and keep plugging away at the last minute details you need to complete to pull it off. To our extreme pleasure, we sold out an event, twice. Once three weeks before the event and again eleven days before.
When you sell out weeks before an event, you get options: 1. Open a bottle of champagne celebrate that your event will go as planned knowing you have a strong plan of action, or 2. Pour a cup of coffee, grab a pencil, sit down and consider how to make adjustments to accommodate more people. Adjustments can mean a variety of considerations from the extreme: secure a new venue or add another day to the less drastic change of furniture or room layout. Each carries additional questions that relates to settings, seating, menu, budget, staffing, and materials. Don’t Sell Out Strategy. To make the important decisions to change an event, circle back to the strategy. What’s the simplest reason to host the thing in the first place? To make money? Connect people? Educate? Go through your strategy and think through how all, not just the additional, people will be served. Do the math. All of it. How many additional tickets you have to sell to make financial sense of the added work to reconfigure the setting for new seating and additional menu items, the material and staff time? Will everyone get what they paid for? Consider the time. Do you have enough time and energy to pull it off? Do you have enough staff to manage the day with additional people? Can you order and ship more give-its for the swag bag? Print more materials for the packet? Make additional custom birch-bark name badges? Consider the place. Sure, maybe you CAN fit 75 more people in the back of the room, but really, SHOULD you make them stand? Carry the torch. Don’t forget about messages! Can you quickly create a new plan to clearly communicate the new world order? Do you need to create additional signs or activities to maximize your space or guide people to the new meeting place? Congratulations you sold out! Rachel Reach Partners An event can provide a venue to differentiate your business from the competition, an opportunity to create a space to show your expertise and exceed customer expectations. Small or large, an event can get you, your product, and your service out of your office (or your head) and into the world. You can use internal speakers or bring-in the big dogs to pose challenges and present the solutions that face your clients. An event can demonstrate that you are, in fact, the thought-leader in your industry. You start the dialogue, pose the unanswered questions and officiate in the solution.
Events create a natural place for personal connection and a natural setting for networking. An event that is not sales-y disarms your audience which allows them to become a willing part of your story, to continue, and more-importantly, build on the conversation you’ve started. Collaborate with like-minded vendors to build relationships across your business-to-business groups can increase the benefit of adding to the depth and breadth to the content of the event for your attendees as well as option of sharing the cost and burden of hosting. Rachel, Reach Partners A great event starts with strategy. A review of all kinds of questions to get at the core intent, what’s the desired feeling, experience, community and most importantly, determine the factors for success. The strategy process allows time to explore ways to work around constraints like budget, time and place – before those constraints are in effect. It’s a time to think through possible risks and barriers and devise tactics to mitigate them. When a project or an event is authorized with a strategy the work in this pre-planning phase saves time and money in the long run. fuzzy bunny /fəzē 'bənē/ adjective An idea that does not match strategy, that in practice may run-up the budget, derail the schedule or take away from the desired experience. Sample strategy questions What purpose is the event going to serve? Who might the attendees be? What sort of experience should attendees have? What might the goal(s) be? What are initial thoughts on date/day/location? What elements of mission, vision, values, and brand should shine through to attendees? What is the potential future for the event in 3-5 years? It’s powerful and rewarding to see a strategy take shape to form a real and tangible experience. Even more so, it’s exciting to use the strategy to combat the fuzzy bunnies that rear their crazy heads in midst of shaping an event. Reach Partners specializes in project management as a trusted partner for solutions. We provide great event strategy. Rachel, Reach Partners Reach Partners and the Women’s Health Conference were excited to partner with Onsharp, a digital marketing company that helps build strategy for online marketing with clear and defined focus. We came to them with no idea how to engage a meaningful online conversation with the audience of the Women’s Health Conference, how to measure success (or failure) or focus our time and efforts. Whitney Nelson, Digital Marketing Strategist and Advanced Funnel Certified, changed all that with a clear road map for content and a schedule for execution. Onsharp truly delivers. This clarity and focus is a subject found in the first issue of the #ONcrew Insider, a newsletter that highlights Onsharp’s success. It describes the partnership and our tremendous success at engaging women and drawing the right people to our website.
When you need a strategy, road map and some clarity when thinking through your digital presence consider working with Onsharp, we are so glad we did! Subscribe to #ONcrew Insider Read more about our work with Onsharp Anita & Rachel |
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