While conferences can greatly enhance a team’s morale, provide education and training, and boost company sales, planning a dynamic conference is hard work. The process involves several lines of communication and thorough organization, collaboration, and budgeting. Making mistakes in the planning stages can be costly and detrimental to your event’s success.
While we already know the ten ways to ensure conference planning success, it’s also important to understand the pitfalls that you need to avoid and how to address them. We’ll offer some examples in this post.
1. Under Planning
Under planning can result in thrown-away funds, wasted time, and worst of all, the failure of your conference. To ensure planning is executed as efficiently as possible, remember to write everything down, keep the information organized, and promote transparency and communication with those involved in the conference’s planning. In other words, cross your “t”s and dot your “i”s.
2. Forgetting the Calendar
When coordinating event dates, times, the venue, vendor, and speaker booking, as well as hiring staff, sticking to your calendar is crucial. You must ensure that each and every person who plays a role in the conference are on the same timeline and schedule. Additionally, you definitely don’t want to have your entire event canceled due to missing the venue’s booking deadline or confirmation date even after all of the marketing and promotions have gone live.
3. Not Budgeting Thoroughly
Here’s a terrifying thought: You’ve secured the venue and hired the key speaker, and then you find there’s no budget for catering. Your conference participants, who paid for their travel in order to attend, will now have to make due with whatever you can scrape together.
This is a nightmare scenario that will reflect poorly not only on the conference but on the planner as well. To prevent this scenario and any like it from popping up, it’s important that you double, triple, and quadruple check your budget, ensuring that there’s ample wiggle-room for surprise costs that may present themselves.
4. Lack of Collaboration
Planning a conference is an extremely ambitious task, and when it’s not done properly, it can result in a failed event. Even professional event planners need assistance every now and then. If you work for a company and are planning their conference, don’t be afraid to involve any necessary departments or create a new planning committee to assist with the event.
If you already have a committee, make certain that all voices are heard, all factors are transparent, and that communication is prioritized. Utilize the different creative and logical minds around you to ensure the event is planned properly and successfully.
5. Overestimating Venue Space
So, you found a venue that is congruent with your conference needs and proceeded to book via email. When you arrive the night before to begin set-up, there are 1,000 chairs that need placing but room for only 500 of them.
It is absolutely imperative to verify a venue’s space fits, or even better, exceeds your needs. When looking for a potential event space, be sure to tour them as thoroughly as possible, ensuring room for every participant and staff member. Remember to consider any special conference events, like workshops, that may require separate rooms.
6. Too Much Focus on Celebrity Speakers
Well-known speakers can bring attention, excitement, and real value to your conference. A big mistake in planning, however, is putting all the focus on these speakers. If all of your attention and promotion is based around one key speaker and they fall ill or have a last-minute emergency that day, your conference will be a bust.
To remedy this, pack your event with a lineup of strong, high-value speakers, even if they’re lesser-known. This enables the conference to continue without a hitch in the event the main speaker cancels.
7. Not Promoting Clear Communication
You don’t want to face a situation like booking the wrong venue or hiring the wrong speakers due to confusing misinformation. However, if communication isn’t clear and all parties involved aren’t on the same page, scenarios of this caliber are likely to occur. To prevent this, promote clear, concise, and transparent communication by way of frequent meetings, open discussions, and interactive project management software.
8. Failure to Secure Vendors
Even if you've found and booked the perfect vendors for your event, many require you to confirm with them, sometimes twice, before they officially become part of your conference.
Verify with the vendor any sort of confirmation policies at your initial meeting to promote clear communication. Then, of course, make a note on your calendar and adhere to those confirmation deadlines.
9. Terrible Time Management
When planning an important conference, you don’t want to fall behind schedule or leave important tasks to the last minute. Poor time management results in a badly organized conference and messy day-of agenda. To prevent this, establish a timetable, share it with all those involved, and stick to it.
Remember to also set aside ample time for promotion. In order to attract attendees, they have to know you’re holding the conference in the first place. Make promotion a priority to gain a sizeable participant base, give them ample time to prepare for travel, and to get and keep them excited for all your event has to offer.
10.Check your Tech
These days, a successful conference is dependent on at least a minimal amount of technology. Whether it’s the proper setup for a PowerPoint presentation or more advanced interactive technology, you need to be sure that everything your presenters need to succeed is up and running. Failure to do so can result in wasted time as you and the speaker try to troubleshoot the problem while your audience looks on, rapidly losing interest.
Option Technologies offers second-to-none technical support for our software, and we offer prompt and efficient service. Don’t have time to set up your technology yourself? We also provide full service rentals, freeing you from worry about your technology.
Now that you have the knowledge to avoid and prevent these ten common event planning mistakes, it’s time to get started. Option Technologies would be happy to assist you in bringing more value to your conference attendees.
