The Art of Event Planning: Event Design

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I define event design as planning event experiences, services and operations for our event customers. Ultimately this means defining steps or parts of our live event that we need to prepare, implement and deliver to our customers. While it makes sense to always think big, it makes no sense to plan big. It’s more productive to plan small, in other words plan from details. For three reasons. It’s easier to do. It’s the way to kill the devils from details. And it’s easier to adjust, re-plan or remove if needed. This is how I design events in practice.

First. I break my event into smaller pieces. The best way to do this is start from our customer groups by splitting event to pieces by customer groups. For two reasons. We deliver our events for customers. We are not running events for the enjoy of doing logistics, security, technical production or any functions whatsoever. Exceeding customers’ expectations takes place all along the customers’ event journey. It is easier to find right spots and tools to do this by jumping into their shoes. For example, if I’m planning a sports event I might title my event plan according to customer segments like: teams, officials, media, event staff, broadcasting, spectators, hospitality guests, staff/volunteers and partners. Instead of planning everything let’s plan just something (at a time). I call these somethings myself as storyboards.

After setting frameworks for planning (like spectators in example above) it’s time to break these again to even smaller pieces. A good way to do this is drawing and thinking customer event journeys. I write down different stages of event journey from the moment we want to impact your customer’s experience yourself until you are ”done” with them. These stages are like mini-events within our main event for a specific customer group. For example with spectators (in sports events) these might be stages like arriving in the city, entering the venue, entering to grandstands, enjoying sports, eating and drinkin, using spectator services. With each stage I think and write a line or two of the following topics: description of stage, key insights, target outcome, responsible person, budget, notes and files.

I want to go even deeper in my designing. When I’m happy with stages which I want to deliver to my customers… yes, I break these one more time for smaller touch points, actions, experiences, services or operations. I call these steps. For example with an example stage of arriving in the park-and-ride area I would split that to steps according to visitors flow like: find parking area, enter parking area, follow guiding to my parking lot, park car, purchase parking ticket via mobile, find your way to shuttle bus, go to toilet, buy refreshments and drinks, get to shuttle bus pick-up area, queue for your bus, get onboard (to bus), ride to venue by bus, use event app while in shuttle bus, move forward (to next stage and its steps).

This is in all simplicity a way to make a difference. Instead of making a plan for ’park-and-ride area’ we plan all details including that one by one. And we include in each of these steps something extraordinary to boost customer experience during customers’ flow in a specific stage. I approach every single step with the same tactic: ”smile in, smile out”. With each step I again think and write a line or two of the following topics: description of step, customer insights, target outcome, things to do/produce, responsible people, production budget, random notes and files.

Proceeding with event design like this, I have a detailed action plan for each customer segment including stages and steps we like to provide in our event. Some pros of this approach includes easiness to remove or adjust details within our event plan and eventually a powerful tool for delegating and communicating plans for others and get back to these at any point during the event project.

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