Event planning is one of the top 5 most stressful jobs in the world - right behind running into burning buildings and attempting to safely land an eighty ton aircraft. Planning events sounds like a fun job to many people, so why is it so stressful? To state it frankly, things many people struggle with everyday - communication, deadlines, working with third parties and budget management - are things an event planner’s job depends on every day. Let’s take a dive into each of these categories to see how they are fundamental to an event planner’s life and effective ways to approach each challenge. 

The Communication Challenge: Communication is a key part of any relationship, whether personal or professional. Communication skills, however, take on a whole new meaning in the event management world. Event planners often serve as a courier between vendors, hosts, speakers, attendees, and their event staff. Organizing, communicating and documenting conversation between various different groups is no small feat. And oftentimes, managers must attempt to communicate through long chains of emails that are bound to get confusing.  It is also difficult to document where breakdown of communication happens between, emails, texts, slack and web calls.

Effective Approach: EventOPS, one effective approach, is an all-in-one for the entire event run-of-show task list and collaborative communication, with security and documentation. From pre-event planning to post-event follow up, we have a rocking way of organizing communication for event planners! Another approach is simply organization and planning. It is amazing that fortune 500 event planners rarely have a complete “game plan” for their team early on.  Not identifying who is responsible for each task and setting standards for communication to ensure it is not lost or overlapped, creates a lot of stress and frustration. Having a clear and repeatable plan is beneficial for managers, as is scheduled meetings where their team can share the communication they have been having with stakeholders. This ensures everyone is on the same page without the frequent long, confusing email chains. 

The Timeline Challenge: Deadlines are tricky for many people. Over a quarter of the population admits to being a chronic procrastinator. But when there is a large budget and thousands of excited attendees and speakers on the line, every minute counts and tasks need to be done efficiently. Event planners have no option but to meet their deadlines, even if that means 12 hour days, skipping meals, and little sleep. If they don’t meet their deadlines, the entire event may be ruined. 

Effective Approach: Swinging back around to the first challenge, communication, is actually an effective way to solve deadline issues. Event managers often take it upon themselves to make sure every single detail of the event is planned and ready for day-of but organizing the internal employees, external guests and third parties make even the simple events complex. The number one way event planners can meet deadlines is to simply ask for help from their team and understand that they’re not alone in this. EventOPS also has an easy way to organize all of your deadlines and sync any calendar you may need so you always know what needs to be done on what day across all of your events.

The Budget Challenge: Money is one of the most stressful factors in a large portion of the population’s life, and budgeting money is challenging and stressful for many people. So, it's unsurprising that tackling an entire event with a tight budget, and with stakeholders having differing views on where the budget should be spent, is stressful (to say the least).  This is compounded by last minute issues and the need to solve challenges with additional expense.

Effective Approach: Other than EventOPS’ budget organization model that updates your budget automatically as you add additional information throughout the event….   A clear budget with a high level view and supporting detail needs to be created for all events and measured against the actual expense. This best practice allows management reporting to the real ROI of events and where costs can be cut without affecting the event goals. Organizing spreadsheets effectively is also key to keeping track of budgets for event planners. You always use the most current, up-to-date, and accurate spreadsheet to ensure all the information is correct. The best way to guarantee this is to allow one, maybe two, people to make edits to the spreadsheet and continually work on the most recent version, deleting the past versions if necessary. Additionally, if you are going to share the spreadsheet with others only allow them to make comments and not edits to assure the only changes are being made by you. 

There are many ways an event manager can combat some of their largest issues. We decided to put all of these effective approaches into one software so you don’t have to go all over the place to solve these challenges. Check out our features page to see exactly how EventOPS will help you.