Base Line Preparations
2.33 Baseline Preparations - Secure biographical info of VIPs
Your important guests are to be treated and introduced appropriately to honor them. Getting the right bio-data becomes important for writing out a good messages for introducing them to the audience (whether in the handouts or verbally).
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1- First of all, use the internet for searching for relevant information which you can later validate. Use google.com for searching for any info that you can find on the VIPs. Also try out people.yahoo.com or LinkedIn.com.
2- If you can’t find VIPs to invite, use nuebbo.com for managing your business contacts. If you have your contacts safely managed in one place, chances are that you won’t have trouble picking and choosing the ones that you want to honor in your event, depending on what the event is.
3- If you don’t have any business contacts to manage, then you surely need to socialize and network more often. Try out whrrl.com for networking and finding people of interest. Remember, event management and promotions is all about networking.
4- When you have the right people hand-picked for your VIP list, send out emails to them requesting for biographical information. Make the emails polite and simple and quick. We use gmail.com.
5- Finally, once you have the VIPs information. To manage that info along with their invitations use Pingg.com. It might be just what you’re looking for, for your event planning needs.
2.32 Baseline Preparations - Website layout and print material finalization
With all of the baseline confirmations taking place, its good to put up a quick landing page online to take down and attract interested prospects.
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1- You can appoint a graphic artist for designs using elance.com. They have all kinds of graphic designers that you can choose from by evaluating their portfolios and feedbacks. Its good to get someone (or a team of people) who has experience in designing and developing sites a well. That way you won’t have to hire and manage multiple teams for getting your event website up.
2- If you want to build your webpage, use our own EventsListed.com - publisher its a quick and easy to use web page builder that allows you to plug in all the multi media tools you want on the page including ticketing and merchandising modules that allow you to sell tickets and merchandise right off the page into your account.
3- Use podipodi.com to enhance your website so that it has rich content and meets your overall theme and objectives. A recommended practice is to make sure your website is monitored properly - use pingdom.com for site monitoring and auto-notifications on its up/down and response times.
4- You should also prepare your final copy for print material, before handing it over for final look and feel designs. Its a good idea to print out the complete story so that people can understand the idea behind the event better. Use moo.com to print out any online content that you have and want to share with your handouts.
5- You can appoint a photographer to take photos of VIPs & honoree’s to add to the print material as well. If you are adding pictures to the print material, use pictoma.com for adding those pictures up easily.
2.31 Baseline Preparations - Confirm dates, venues, contracts and attendance
Getting confirmations can be quite a headache if it isn’t managed properly. There are so many things to confirm from dates, venues, entertainment contracts to catering and attendance. Most guest estimates and catering contracts are based on getting confirmations from attendees, VIPs and honorees. Then there are other contracts and security plans all based on getting accurate confirmations and estimates. So, lets see how the web can help us in this regard:
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1- If you’re booking hotels for guests use zoomandgo.com for reviewing the hotels and confirming them at instantly.
2- Before finalizing your venues, do check out qybe.com to see what kinds of places interest people. So if you want an innovative venue idea, visit the site before setting it in stone.
3- For entertainment options, if you are hosting an event for a specific niche, get micro-celebs that they’ll be able to relate with and feel excited about seeing. You can use pop17.com to find those niche based celebrities that everyone wants to meet. This will later help you build more hype around your event.
4- With all of the different dates and confirmations to manage, make sure you don’t forget inportant meetings or emails. Use bluetie.com as a shared calendar for your event relates dates so that nothing leaks through the cracks.
5- Finally, getting confirmations from attendees is crucial for your plans. Use myinvites.com for your RSVP management. It’ll handle all of your invitations for you so that you don’t have to worry about different invitations threads all the time.
2.23 Baseline Preparations - Event Funding and Finances
Managing your finances after getting funded is vital for survival - you become answerable for how well you manage the finances, so its good to have useful financial management tools at hand.
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1- You’ll need a handy expense calculation tool to know what you owe to different stakeholders and vice versa. You can check out ioweyou.co.uk to see if it meets your requirements.
2- Having the expenses written down is just one thing, measuring its trends and making sure your expenses are in line with your budget is another. Spendview.com helps you analyze your expenses so that you can plan the financial aspects of the event better.
3- Often we find it difficult to put a tab on all our bills. BillQ has been developed to solve just that. If you find yourself in the same position as well, get mybillq.com to get ‘handle on your bills’.
4- Finally if you are using good old spreadsheets for major report calculations. Why not use an online collaborative sheet rather than a computer based one that can’t easily be shared. You’re already familiar with Google Docs - this time try out smartsheet.com. They’re more focused towards making the spreadsheet experience much less painful.
5- For managing the invoices sent out by your vendors, try using mint.com as an invoice management tool. Its a popular choice and integrates well with most payment systems.
2.22 Baseline Preparations - Preparing snazzy proposal for investors
Once you have your numbers worked out, I’m sure the next you’d be doing is putting in countless hours to get a snazzy little proposal prepped up for the prospective investors and sponsors. Thanks to the world of web 2.0 applications, it can take much less time to build high-quality content using different online tools.
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1- Lets see, first of all, we have 280slides.com, which is always a great place to start. You can see slides added by other people and use them in your presentations. It makes it much easier to share presentation slides with other community members and is also great for getting inspiration and ideas on your presentation layout.
2- If you’ve had prior experience that you want to showcase in your proposal, what better way to do that than showing photos and pictures of the events. fotoviewr.com makes stunning photo galleries made out of your flickr photos in just minutes.
3- If you have photos to add to your portfolio and proposals but they require a little tweaking and touchups. Worry no more - just use WowaPic.com for professional touch ups of the photos, before adding them to your content.
4- I would say, don’t just stop at pictures. Sometimes your credibility can be showcased better with video content - and if you have such great clips lying around your workspace, lets put them to use. Use omnisio.com to do cool things with your video.
5- Another great tool that you can use to translate your proposal into a mindmap for simplified action plans - use text to mindmap converter tool called text2mindmap.com. Now it will take your team lesser time to get started in implementing everything that you have planned. Finally, when you are ready to send your proposals, but are worried about the large file sizes because of the rich content that you’ve put together; use filemail.com for sendign those large files without hassle.
2.21 Baseline Preparations - Planning Working Capital Requirements
Before approaching investors or sponsors, its best to have the working capital requirements all figured out. While most of it involves forecasting your cash-flows based on your strategic objectives of the event, you need to be prepared for minimizing the risks of uncertainty as well. Implementing contingency plans helps you deal with that. As for the cash flows, the better you can calculate the smoother your event will be. This is all about planning, planning and planning - so I’m going to share a few cool tools that can help you plan and calculate better.
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1- When you are determining your working capital requirements, its good to put them against your event launch plans. If you are preparing the estimates to raise capital in a team, you can get them to put the event timeline together first using timetoast.com.
2- When calculating the capital requirements, make sure you put in the human factor as well - you may need to appoint the event’s chairperson and manager, and hence estimate their costs accordingly. Having the right set of people on the team effects the success of your event. If you’re hiring contractual workers, you can check out their rates at www.odesk.com.
3- When you have your core team together, often the most important thing is keeping everyone on the same page. Use planzone.com to plan the working capital requirements together. Planzone is an online web 2.0 collaborative planning tool.
4- If you have a bigger team on-board and a larger event to manage, e.g. global conferences. Then you can use clearwiki.com for collaborative planning. Clearwiki is meant for private businesses and offers more stability.
5-If your team can not seem to decide between multiple investment opportunities, or which investors to approach to secure working capital, try using skimbit.com - its an online comparison tool for group decisions and will help you weigh out your options and put things in perspective.
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