Event organisation - it looks easy

Organising an event looks easy and, if it’s done right, it should do.  Unfortunately many people find that, when they come to do it themselves, it is anything but.  There are always lots of details, any one of which can bring the project into difficulty and which can make the event look “amateur”.  If you want your conference, product launch, customer thank-you or whatever else you have in mind, to go smoothly there are some basics you need to get right.

When it comes to organising an event, of whatever kind, it’s important to start at the end.  When is it to be held?  Does that leave enough time to prepare everything?  Are there any fixed points that cannot be changed?  Sometimes it’s the time of year, sometimes an actual date, that is important.  Other things, like Bank Holidays, may influence the best time for your event and they need to be established before booking a venue.

When deciding on a venue it’s important to realise what the pitfalls are.  I once had to set up an event where access for the stand equipment was so poor that large pieces of metal equipment had to be negotiated around glass-walled corridors.  Another had a huge pillar in a room which was hosting a seminar, which meant that the seating arrangement was almost impossible to sort out.  Needless to say, I had not booked nor seen the venues beforehand!

Depending on the venue, some will insist you use their caterers, or include support you don’t need, and charge by the delegate, when you may not know how many people you will have attending.  It’s important to have a spreadsheet which covers all the items you have to spend money on, so that you can see if you are keeping within your budget.

Spellchecker failure

Newspapers long ago dispensed with proofreaders, having decided that spellchecker would do the job for them.  Unfortunately spellchecker does not pick up words that are actually spelt correctly, but the wrong word in the context.

Two found in the same article in the Sunday Times this week:

With the excellence of his performance against Scotland we now that it was not ideas, but gas.

Farrell Jr is already an infinite superior Union player to his father.

In the second case infinite should be infinitely.

Mistakes like this fall into the category of letters left out to form a completely new word:

her becomes he, then becomes the, bonny becomes bony, scar becomes car.

These are very difficult mistakes to pick up.  The thing is, when a reader comes across this kind of thing in your promotional material he or she is likely to pause, to try and make out what the word should be, or perhaps completely misunderstand what you are trying to say.  Worst of all, they may just abandon reading at that point.