Event Planning and Management (Chapter 4) PDF

04 == Developing your events programme and content -------------------------------------------- -- -- - apply the different event elements to your planning; - build in event elements that focus on the event experience; - understand how to develop an event that immerses participants;...

04 == Developing your events programme and content -------------------------------------------- -- -- - apply the different event elements to your planning; - build in event elements that focus on the event experience; - understand how to develop an event that immerses participants; - consider creative theming options; - develop a relevant event programme; - understand how to integrate virtual elements in your event. - Conferences, seminars, workshops - Exhibitions - Launches - Parties and corporate hospitality #### Event elements ##### Venue ##### Food & Beverage (F&B) ##### Hospitality ##### Entertainment ##### Special effects and décor - **Indian Bazaar Zone --** More than 120 stalls selling Indian food, textiles, organic cosmetics, henna, jewellery etc. - **Relax Zone --** Yoga, meditation and Ayurveda classes for all ages. - **Cultural Zone --** Represents the best of India and Russia through dance programmes, live music and even fashion shows. - **Wedding Zone --** One of the most popular things Indians are known for is their weddings. Over 10 Russian couples daily get married as per Vedic traditional rituals. - **Dance Masterclass Zone --** A zone where all styles of Indian dance forms (from classical to Bollywood) are shown, step by step, for everyone to practise. - **Indian Films Zone --** An open-air cinema where attendees get the chance to watch the best that Bollywood has to offer. - **Chess Zone --** India is known for the game of chess and in this zone, children and adults from both India and Russia compete to win. #### The event experience - Make the experience as immersive as possible. - Theme the experience. - Provide 'indelible' impressions by creating stand-out and memorable moments. - Eliminate negative cues -- remove all elements that detract from the theme and the experience. - Mix in memorabilia -- take-away items that will act to remind and refresh the memory after the event. This may seem somewhat out of date in a world looking to reduce waste and consumption. A more modern approach might be to allow moments that are good for capturing and sharing on social media. - Freedom -- the event feels different from everyday life. - Belonging -- the event gives the attendee a sense of community. - Authenticity -- the content provided is novel, relevant, real, or fantastical. - Transcendence -- derived from the three above, the attendee has moments of insight or pleasure either individually or as part of a group or crowd. #### Immersion ##### Imaginative immersion ##### Challenge-based immersion ##### Sensory immersion #### Theming ##### Overlaid story theme ##### Topic theme ##### Visual theming #### Programming ##### Welcome ##### Build ##### Peak moment(s) ##### Ending ##### Downtime and mealtimes - **Small group work** allows every person present to actively participate in and influence what happens at a meeting. Its simplest form, **pair share**, creates short one-on-one conversations between attendees, with each given equal time to respond to a question. I ran numerous pair shares during this workshop, the first on: 'What's your biggest challenge to improving your conference?' - **Human spectrograms** (also called **body voting**) have participants arrange themselves in the room to reflect their answer to a question. They provide an efficient way to uncover group information that is of interest to its members. Everyone can see who's in specified groups and meet people who are similar to them. During the AHA workshop, we turned the room into a geographic map to allow people to discover who lived near them. Participants lined up by their years of experience as cardiologists, and we then used the line to create small groups each containing a range of experience. Most participants had more than one professional role, so we created triangular spectrograms to view the mix of education/clinical/research, and the research cardiologists explored their mix of population/clinical/basic work. - Participants also experienced **The Three Questions** -- in my opinion, the best way to open a conference designed for active learning, connection and engagement. Each attendee in turn shared their answers to the following three questions (there are no wrong answers) with their group: - How did I get here? - What do I want to happen? - What experience or expertise do I have that might be of interest to others? - Through their answers, people shared their relevant past, present and desired future with other participants. Group members made individual connections. Common interests and topics for later discussion emerged. - **Fishbowl** is a simple set of rules that make it easy to facilitate a large group discussion. AHA participants used a fishbowl to discuss a topic near to their hearts: 'What is the best heart-healthy diet?' We began with a human spectrogram that uncovered participants' opinions of plant-based versus omnivore diets, followed by a lively fishbowl discussion. - We spent workshop time exploring issues of specific interest to the AHA participants. Some of the topics covered included: how to hold better poster sessions, crowdsourcing topics for meeting sessions, using a buddy system for first-time attendee support, and the best ways to follow up presentations in more depth. I also employed **Wants and Offers**, a flip chart and sticky note technique, to help AHA speciality conference organizers request and share presenter resources from their professional networks. - The workshop included two short presentations on key meeting design concepts: - *The conference arc*: the essential structure of participant-driven and participation-rich meetings; and - Six reasons to change our conferences: 1. Traditional sessions provide no connections around content. 2. Lectures are a terrible way to learn. 3. The availability of online content. 4. Professionals now learn predominantly socially, not in the classroom. 5. Today, everyone has expertise and experience to share. 6. Most pre-scheduled sessions don't address actual attendee wants and needs. - Finally, I ran a **Group Spective**, a session that gives attendees time to collectively take stock. I used **Plus/Delta**: a review tool that enables participants to quickly identify what went well at an event and the development of new initiatives and improvements. This closing session built community around a shared experience, and provided valuable feedback on future events to meeting stakeholders. #### Virtual event design considerations ##### Immersion ##### Theming ##### Programme - Making any event memorable requires an events manager to combine the available event elements to create a unique event experience for the event attendee. - Actively engaging attendees can be achieved by creating immersive experiences using a combination of imaginative, challenge-based and sensory immersion techniques. - Theming the event is an important means of using common story, meaning or visual tools to communicate with, and create shared meanings for, your attendees. - Events should have a pre-planned programme of content that manages the level of engagement and energy and allows attendees time to orientate and establish themselves at an event before building to memorable peak moments. - Online and virtual events need to consider how to engage and immerse audiences on their own terms rather than simply replicating existing event concepts and plans. 1. What are the key components of designing event content? 2. What support could you get in developing content for a business event? 3. What steps could you take to integrate hybrid elements into the design of event content?