Feasibility Analysis
1.18 Feasability Analysis - Establishing a legal structure
Planning out the legalities of an event, is probably the most tiresome yet important part of the project. Having a strong legal structure means that you have a solid plan. So take out the time to really do this part carefully.
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1- Go through the Event Management Body of Knowledge at www.juliasilvers.com Resources for information on any laws related to event management that you need to be aware of. They have considerable detail regarding different dynamics and modalities of events. Knowledge is power, so make sure you are aware of all laws.
2- Use the health and safety performance indicator at www.bgateway.com to make sure your plans are safe and under the health laws of the State. If you are hosting or managing an event, the safety of the audience and participants becomes your direct responsibility - so make sure you take this responsibility maturely. The tool is good, so please do check it out.
3- If you need to have access to State Laws, the HG.org has a good resource collection for you. Go over it to make sure there isn’t any specific event related law that you may be breaking. The local laws may vary from State to State, so its good to be safe than sorry.
4- When building your Event Committee, make sure you have all of the different elements right. You will fine a nice sample committee planning guide at the Oregon state university website in the student involvement section under planning guide . For bigger events, you have chairperson, president and other elected bodies in the committee. Having the right balance in the committee is key to your event’s success.
5- Finally, if you still need lawyers to work out the finer details of equity, go to this directory FindLaw.com to find a lawyer in your State that suits your budget and needs.
1.17 Feasibility Analysis Stage - Researching real world examples
As you know, for event planning, we really need to be in the know at all times. We often have to research for similar events that are happening around us or look for case-studies that we can evaluate and learn from. If research is not done in a methodical way with the proper tools, you can end up wasting a lot of time. Ok, so today I just want to talk about different ways of getting started with your research.
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1- As you know the best research tool that we have on our hands is Google. You can customize your searches using google.com/trends and google.com/analytics. Both of these are good for analyzing market trends and seeing how well your competitors are doing.
2- Next off, you need to keep a constant tap on the events taking place around us. You can bookmark the hulu.com Event Coverage page for the latest video clips of global and local events. They have videos of everything from shows, summits, national level activities.
3- You can also get the AOL videos of recent events directly off to your RSS readers. They update their site regularly with new and interesting videos of how events are being managed and thrown across the country.
4- Another great subscription will be the Promo magazine (www.promomagazine.com). They cover news and case studies of events and branding activities taking shape around us. Its definitely a good way to keep yourself in the loop of whats happening.
5- As you keep across interesting events and promotions happening around, you can start bookmarking them using 2collab.com - a great collaborative way of sharing bookmarks with your team. Otherwise it becomes very difficult to go back and find the interesting things that you found during your initial research.
1.16 - Feasibility Analysis Stage - Researching Your Market
When you are conceptualizing your event, why not get a feel for the different market segments before deciding which one to target. You can learn more about targeting markets for your event at the EventsListed.com Social Media Strategies blog.
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1. For many events if you are using online social media strategies for marketing, you would want to know what percentage of the population, and specifically the percentage of your demographics use the internet. The website Internet World Stats.com gives you those statistics on a platter for free.
2. Event management is all about making sure you can get a maximum impact event within your budget. adwords.Google.com has a great traffic estimator that can help us calculate just how expensive a market would be to advertise in. It uses keyword searches to give a clear picture about how much it would cost to reach your specific demographics if you are planning on advertising online.
3. Event marketing is about building evangelists within your communities who can market your events for you. A great way is to target evangelists who already authorities in the market and have people following them. You can search for these authority blogs using Google’s Blogsearch.Google.com.
4. This is a competitive business, and we really need to know what other market leaders are up to at all times. Compete.com offers a great and simple way to track them which completely takes the headache away. Compete gives a snapshot view of how your event websites are doing as opposed to your competitors.
5. Finally, when you’re looking for ways to find your targeted audiences, one of the most effective ways is to find them on different mailing lists of interest. Instead of looking for individual mailing list sites, you can use lists.Nextmark.com to do that for you. It lets you search for different markets according to consumers or businesses using keywords of your choice. It is an extremely powerful tool with about 60,000 mailing lists in its database that you can get to for free.
1.15 - Feasibility Analysis Stage - Shortlisting dates
When planning your events, its important to be able to schedule the perfect date keeping different seasonal and market considerations in mind. Its also important to have backup dates - just in case something goes wrong. Here are some links that you can help you shortlist your event dates.
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1. Planning dates for your event means using a good team Calendar to keep everyone on the same page. We would definitely recommend the calendar 30 Boxes. It has a lot of cool features, is completely customizable and you can share it with your entire team and also your clients if you want.
2. When you’re shortlisting event dates, it become important to make sure that there isn’t anything bigger going on before, during or right after your event. You would also want to know what other events are taking place within your market so that you can schedule your event wisely. A great way to do this is by keeping a tap on events using EventFul which is a great global event calendar.
3. If you already have other desktop calendar such as Outlook - you can easily sync your 30boxes calendar with it using a software called SyncMyCal. These two-way syncs are great to make sure your calendars are always accurate so that you don’t mess up when selecting your event dates.
4. To shortlist dates, its good to get a feel for popular venues within your targeted market. The Eventful Venue Search offers a great way to search for the hottest and most rated venues in your area.
5. Finally, before locking down your date, you should also check the availability of your shortlisted venues. iSmart Software is a great way to check the availability of venues and also to do advanced online bookings.
1.14 - Feasibility Analysis Stage - Shortlisting entertainment options
Your initial conceptualization stage also involves planning the activities and entertainment options for your event. There are a number of interesting online resources that you can put to use in order to shortlist the most appropriate entertainment solutions for your event.
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1. Music is always an important part of entertainment for most events. We have two great community based sites where you can sample music that is popular amongst your targeted audiences. Imeem.com and Buzznet.com give a lot of insight into the latest music vibes around us. If you are really getting into social marketing, you can even get your targeted audiences to build the playlists for you to get them excited about your event.
2. Its always a good idea to put the budget for entertainment aside. You can use Evite.com’s Budget Calculator to estimate your entertainment expenses and then select the entertainment options accordingly.
3. If you want to engage your audiences and community early in the planning stages, what better way to do that than provide them with a platform where they can discuss ideas and give feedback. iPartee.com allows you to build private or public pages for your events and also has the option of inviting people from your FaceBook or email addresses directly to the page. Its a great and simple way of kick-starting small parties and building excitement in your crowd.
4. If you are looking for entertainment and venue options for Corporate events, be sure to check out the Supplier Network at Cvent.com. These services are available for event managers in USA and Canada where you can search for all kinds of services and vendors according to the geographic location of the event.
5. Otengo.com is a file sharing software that you can use to keep all of your interactions with your entertainment vendors. Otengo is great for exchanging large video samples or file sizes as it keeps uploading and downloading files in the background on your desktop so that you can keep working on your plans. The thing I like best about Otengo is that it doesn’t restrict us to file-size or space, you can share unlimited file sizes.
1.13 - Feasibility Analysis Stage - Selecting a theme
The theme or concept of your event will define the entire experience that you are planning for your audiences. In many ways the success of the event comes down to how well it was conceptualized.
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1. Its very important to have at least one good reliable resource for theme ideas based on actual market likes and dislikes. Evite is a website that has great ideas for themes that you can refer to for inspiration.
2. When choosing themes, its a good practice to look what kind of activities interest your market. The great thing about the internet is that you can dive into niche communities and be able to understand exactly what kind of event themes would interest them. Two great community based news sites to follow niche communities are kirsty.com and mixx.com.
3. Theme based parties usually have web pages made for the event where your targeted audiences can connect with each other, make suggestions and get involved. You can make these pages in social networking sites and have them link to your company website. If you don’t have a website already, you can make one in Jimdo.com where you can build custom websites with videos and photos from your events and upload them for free.
4. When you have your event pages all up and ready, you can enlist your events (if public) in calendars and directories so that people can easily search for them and get notifications about them. One sure place to get enlisted is Zvents.com. They have a socially active user community that you can get to immediately.
5. Finally, to keep up with the newest and hottest trends in the industry, get a free online subscription to keep ahead of the game with the Event-Solutions.com. They also have a great resource directory called the ‘Black Book’ that you can use to find vendors for your event’s theme decor, entertainment or any other aspect of planning.
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