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Preparing for your Sydney event or conference
Whether you’re running a business meeting, a party or a major conference in Sydney, do not start planning any event until you are thoroughly prepared. Before you book venues or invite speakers, you’ll need a comprehensive blueprint and water-tight strategy for the event.
Define what you hope to achieve from your event
It’s important to work out what you want to achieve from your event and to stick to it. Develop an event outline and checklist to help you to work out your objectives and refer to it continually throughout the event process.
In the event outline, detail the primary and secondary objectives of the event and how you are going to achieve and measure them.
Be prepared - event and conference checklist
One of the most frequent mistakes made by new event and conference planners is to launch into the ‘planning’ before they’ve done the ‘preparation’, leaving themselves vulnerable to budget blowouts, double-booking, lost tasks and mixed messages.
Are your conference or event ideas practical?
The problem is that if you are not thoroughly and strategically prepared, as your event develops and evolves, you are likely to find you have already locked in dates, places, venues and people that later become inappropriate or impractical.
Event and conference timeline
Creating a timeline will force you to work backwards from your proposed event date and build in all the necessary lead-times for each activity. Knowing that it will take printers three weeks to deliver your invitations will dictate how early you need to confirm the design, and how much time you are able to give your guests to RSVP.
Flexible event budgets
Developing an accurate budget - and allowing flexibility for unexpected expenses - will enable you to prioritise how and where you will spend your money. Knowing just how much the venue and catering cost will govern your decision on the type of entertainment to engage.
More Sydney event preparation guide resources
We've created some resources to help you in the preparation of your event every step of the way:
Do you know about our free event planning service?
Business Events Sydney’s free event planning service, AccessNSW can assist you with finding all the event products and services you need.
Just complete a Request for Proposal and we’ll be in contact.
Event tip
If you cannot clearly define what the event’s purpose is how will the team fulfil its goals? Write a clear plan of what you want to achieve then refer to it along the way.
