Scaling an event requires assigning the right amount of resources and taking the right strategic approach. How you scale your event will impact both your guests’ experience and the result of future editions. If you don’t allocate your resources effectively, you risk scaling an event that won’t meet your guests’ expectations for quality and professionalism.
In this guide, we’ll cover the steps to take and key considerations when scaling your events.
1. Evaluate Your Resources
The first step is to understand what resources you have available, and the second step is to ensure that your team has everything they need to be able to do their job to the best of their ability, which will in turn help you scale your events.
Essentially, you need to make sure you have enough money and manpower to support the growth of your events. Some parts of an event can get away with less manpower, but others you will need to focus on, such as logistics. Create a list for your event of ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice-to-haves’. Using volunteers is a good idea for additional manpower on event day. For additional financial resources, raise investment or lean on sponsorship to keep you within budget.
Conduct internal research and ask yourself the following:
• Are there any additional goals worth pursuing via events?
• Do we have the budget and resources for expansion?
• Do attendees want/need more from our company?
• What industry trends might influence our event strategy?
• How could additional events help other departments achieve their goals?
2. Have a Clear and Concise Strategy
It’s important to understand how events fit into your overall business goals, as this will help you focus on the events with the greatest impact and effectively allocate your resources.
Plan your events calendar with your team, and consider what your event aims to achieve and who your target audience is. Once you’ve answered these questions, you can design the event to meet your objectives.
3. Streamline Your Process
To scale your events effectively, you should first review all your processes and determine how to maximise your team’s operational efficiency. This applies to everything from budgeting to how you run your meetings to communicating with stakeholders to internal role setting. Every team member should be able to review a process and understand it. Simplify everything.
An example of this is outsourcing venue and supplier sourcing. Finding the perfect venue and suitable suppliers can be a lengthy and costly process. With a little help, this is all managed for you, and you won’t have to spend hours trawling through endless options to find the suppliers for you.
4. Automate As Much As Possible
The less manual work your events team needs to do during the planning, delivery, and evaluation process, the easier you’ll find it to scale your events. Automating as much as possible will help you save time and money by streamlining the planning process and making it more cost- and time-efficient.
Identify the most time-consuming areas in your current planning process and automate them with integrated platforms. You can automate website set-up, registration, ticketing, branded email confirmations, reminders and invites, floor plans, feedback, and more. Once the majority has been automated, it’ll be much quicker and easier to repeat the process for the next event by setting up templates consistent with your brand and objectives.
5. Partner With Reliable Event Experts
No matter how experienced you and your team are, scaling your events will require external support. Start by identifying gaps in your team’s ability, knowledge, and time and research vendors who can help you fill those gaps to achieve your goals and scale your events.
Consider the following:
• Will you need help with marketing your event?
• Do you need an event website but don’t have someone on your team with web development expertise?
• Are you creating TV-quality video content but don’t have the equipment or talent to make it happen?
• Do you need on-site support or management?
Building strong supplier relationships over time will put you in a better position to negotiate the best rates and get more value for your money. Not only can they save you money, but they can also bring fresh ideas and perspectives into your planning process and help you create more rounded experiences for your audience.
6. Analyse Your Data
Data is the key to understanding how successful your events have been and how successful they can be next time. When planning your events, ensure you have SMART goals in place and define exactly how you will measure your chosen metrics. You can then analyse past data to identify mistakes, challenges, and opportunities from previous events, and use this to refine processes for future events and realign them with your business objectives.
Gather your team and review each metric individually to understand what’s working and what’s not.
Scaling an event may feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Partnering with an event staffing agency like Coalition will make it easier to scale your event to bigger audiences. We handle your staffing needs and can work with you to address any skill or knowledge gaps.
