After being part of three events with The Consulting Alliance this past year that drew nearly 100 people, and being the emcee of over a dozen lunches that attracted 35-50 people, I decided to reflect on what made these events a success. Here are 5 Tips for running a successful event.<\/p>\n
1. Have a consistent schedule. The Consulting Alliance lunches are always the 2nd Friday of every month from 1130-1:30 at Wolfert’s Roost. Our format is consistent while are speakers are dynamic.<\/p>\n
2. For a special event, do a search of every organization in the area you are planning an event. Chamber events are just a start; see what other organizations are doing. Upon research, we saw that the CEG dinner was going to be the same night we originally planned the event, so we moved it to the following week to not conflict with the CEG event.<\/p>\n
3. Get involvement from many members of your team and circle to promote the event. We had members of The Consulting Alliance, past clients and attendees all push the event. We also added incentives for members to bring a guest.<\/p>\n
4. Promote via LinkedIn groups, not Facebook. Our Facebook event page only showed that 7 people were attending at one point, when in fact we had over 50 registered; don’t count on event pages on Facebook as your only source. We got more out of sharing the event through a variety of means on Facebook and LinkedIn, not just an event page.<\/p>\n
5. Make your event about others, not just about you. Have a variety of speakers and programming, as well as ways for people to attend a before or after event special event. Each lunch we do has a pre-event mixer, a speaker, and after event mingling.<\/p>\n