From the course: Virtual Events Essential Training

Define your virtual event goal

From the course: Virtual Events Essential Training

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Define your virtual event goal

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- Planning an event can be overwhelming. I have been there. You have been there, or maybe you are about to be there. You have to make a ton of decisions, each of which could lead to a potential win or not. But there is one thing you can do that will help you evaluate every idea that comes up and allow you to stay focused on what truly matters. Every experienced event planner does it, and you have to do it too if you want your event to be a success. Define your event's goal. Having a clear goal helps you make the right decisions about the event at every step along the way. How do you do that? By simply answering the question, what do I want to happen after my event is over. Possible answers could be, I want us to get a thousand new leads that our sales team can approach and try to sell our product or services to. I want us to make 500,000 US dollars so that we return a hundred percent of our investment and have 50% profit. Or I want us to increase our brand's website traffic by 20%. Be as specific as you can be and use numbers so that afterwards you can measure whether or not you achieved what you wanted. Let's look at an example. Let's imagine that you are organizing the Present to Succeed conference, the largest premium presentation skills event in the world. Our end goal is to achieve half a million US dollars in sales. Why? Because our expenses are 250K. We also target 50% profit and we want to use the remaining part of the revenue to reinvest in next year's event. Now imagine that you or someone from your team says let's make this event free of charge. You evaluate this idea by asking is this going to help us achieve our goal? Well, the answer would probably be no, because if you don't have sales from the events tickets it'll be extremely hard for you to achieve the number that you're chasing. Thus, this idea which is otherwise a great idea, probably won't work for you this time. Having a clear goal is absolutely fundamental to planning your event. Don't move on with the next steps if you haven't crystallized this first. And once you have that goal, use it constantly to evaluate any idea that comes up for the event, whether it's related to a design of your brand, your sales approach, or the speakers you invite, spend some time now thinking through your goal. What do you want to have achieved when the event is over? Write that down and keep it top of mind throughout the whole process.

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