Important questions to consider before creating an event

Gaining mastery of your subject area, being organized, and exhibiting passion are all essential for creating successful events. With the right skills, you are then ready to move on to the actual planning and execution stages of your events. This is where you will want to consider the logistical aspects of running events to help ensure that everything goes smoothly for you and your attendees.

Here are 7 important questions to think about before you create your event:

1. What location will you choose for your event(s)?

Physical In-Person Events

If you are offering traditional classes or courses, the location will usually be set by the institution you are affiliated with. For example group tutoring sessions for students or staff training for faculty at your school, whether that be elementary, secondary, or any other educational institution.

If you are already a business owner and have your own space, such as a yoga or art studio, then you will likely want to run most of your events there.

If you are a solo entrepreneur or someone who is not affiliated with any specific event location or you wish to branch out into other locations, then you will need to give this question some good thought. Just like in real estate, the location can make it or break it. So when it comes to your event, the location you choose will greatly determine the success of the event and the overall experience for both you and your attendees.

Important factors to consider here would be the cost of renting an event space, the accessibility of the event space, including the availability of parking and public transport, the size of the space, date availability, technology and teaching tools you will have access to, and so on.

Virtual Online Events

In certain cases, you may choose or be forced to conduct your event(s) online in a virtual manner. Instead of trying to decide on a physical location, this case requires you to decide on the right technology service to facilitate your online event.

Important factors to consider here would be how easy the chosen service is to use for you and your audience, its functionality, reliability, support, and cost.

2. How will you attract the right audience?

Depending on the nature of your event, this may be very easy or very challenging to do. You may already have an audience eagerly awaiting your events or you may be trying to break through in your area of expertise or community. Whichever situation you find yourself in, one thing is certain: you must have a way to effectively announce your event to others and draw attention to it.

Things to consider here would be any necessary marketing or advertising, use of social media, use of community news outlets, bulletin boards, etc. Given that most people today use the Internet to obtain most of their information, you will likely wish to ensure that you and your business have a good online presence and use an email list to communicate quickly and easily with your audience.

3. What resource materials should you make available to your audience?

There are many resource materials and props that would strengthen your presentation as a speaker or teacher and ones from which your audience would greatly benefit or need. For example, you may wish to consider selling or providing a book or similar publication at your event, whether that be something written by you or someone else. If your events deal with music, you may need or wish to provide specific musical instruments, music sheets, or audio music files. If you teach classes or workshops that deal with any other tactile areas, resource materials for consideration could be anything from yoga mats to drawing tools.

Here again, the right preparation is the key to success. Your audience may not be able to easily get the things required for your event, in which case making them available as part of the event cost will go a long way. Alternatively, while people can take notes during or after your event, providing them with something that will summarize or reinforce the concepts presented can boost audience morale, help them focus on what is being presented, enhance comprehension and feeling of success, and in turn boost your event's success.

4. What obstacles or unexpected circumstances may you have to plan for or deal with?

A positive mindset is an integral asset to have for successful and desirable outcomes. However, being prepared by considering possible challenges that may arise before, during, or after your event is equally important. Being ill-prepared, naive, or ignorant does not bode well for life in general, never mind when it comes to running a successful business or event. Therefore, consider this question as fully as you can, while keeping fear and anxiety at bay, to decrease the likelihood of finding yourself in an uncomfortable or unpleasant situation.

Here are some examples of circumstances that may arise and require your consideration:

Will you have to factor in any inclement weather potential? If so, how will you deal with it?
If your event offers or deals with food in any way, are you ready for any allergies or specific dietary requirements that may be needed?
If your event is associated with the outdoors, how prepared will you be to handle any medical emergencies that may arise?
If your event is online and uses a third-party service, how will you prepare for any technical issues that may arise?
How will you ensure you don't run out of room or materials at your event?
How will you handle any refunds? And so on.

Running an event can be stressful enough, so the aim is not to add any extra unnecessary stress to it. For the smoothest, seamless, and most enjoyable events, it pays to be prepared and have a backup plan or solutions, as needed, to cover any potential challenges that may arise.

5. How will you collect registrations for your event?

How you collect registrations for your event will greatly depend on the nature of your event and your target audience. Even though most events today will use online registration services, if your event is for seniors at a nursing home or a remote community with limited internet access, then this will not be an effective way to collect registrations.

For certain events, you may not need to collect registrations at all and simply leave the event wide open for everyone. While this can work for events in very small communities or certain predictable situations, for most events such an approach is not recommended because it leaves you vulnerable and unprepared when it comes to things like the size of the audience, the size of the space, resource materials required, transportation challenges, etc. You may have too few people show up, wasting your time and efforts, or too many people show up and be unprepared to handle the volume of needs.

The good news is that today there are numerous online registration software service options. There is something out there for every kind of event, budget, user, and audience type. Here at Corsizio, we pride ourselves on offering an easy-to-use, modern, effective, and affordable online registration solution.

6. How will you collect payments for your event?

Next to collecting registrations, collecting payments for your events is one of the most important considerations. That is, of course, assuming you are holding paid events. If your events have no cost whatsoever associated with them, not even a donation, then you can bypass this consideration altogether.

Not that long ago, payments for events had to be collected in physical ways, whether that was cash, check, or similar method, and often in very tedious ways. Sometimes it meant chasing people down to get your payment prior to, or even after, the event. Even if you collected payment at the door, this would increase administrative work, time and preparation, and could easily turn into a hassle for both you and your attendees when it came to having the right change, offering the right payment methods, and so on.

Fortunately today, payment for events can be collected quickly, easily, and securely via numerous online service options and in ways that satisfy your needs and those of your potential attendees. On Corsizio, we provide you with the ability to collect the entire payment at the time of registration or just a deposit payment to secure a commitment from your potential attendees. Additionally, you can discount your event price in various ways whether using coupons, early-bird discounts, or volume discounts to generate more interest and sales for your events.

Getting your attendees to pay for your event at the time of their registration also provides many other benefits to you. Collecting registrations and payments before a certain date can help you plan for the right sized location. It can help you fund the event, deal with any up-front event costs, such as the purchase of resource materials, etc. Ultimately, it provides peace of mind and removes stress from one of the biggest aspects of running events.

7. How will you collect feedback about your event?

Although it can be intimidating, at times, to hear what other people think about our speaking, teaching, presentation skills, method of delivery or content presented, getting feedback is one of the most important things to help you gauge your effectiveness and plan accordingly for next time. This applies to nearly all areas of our personal and professional lives. While we can never satisfy everyone, and some people are just overly critical by nature, getting feedback allows you to better know your strengths and weaknesses and those of your events.

In our own minds, we can have a lot of ideas about how we are, be these positive or negative. However, these ideas may be anywhere from slightly to greatly removed from reality. This is where the more feedback we get, the more we can observe patterns and learn about what is working and what isn't when it comes to our teaching style, content, event characteristics, and more

As with the previous two areas, you can either collect feedback manually or automatically. Manual feedback collection would include something like handing out physical paper forms for your audience to fill in after your event, and then collecting and compiling that information. Automatic feedback collection would include using some kind of web-based technology where feedback requests are quickly and easily disseminated to all participants and submitted back to you for analysis. Corsizio provides you with such an ability to automatically collect ratings and feedback from your attendees, once your event has ended and gain valuable insight about their experience with your events.