5 Tips to Ensure a Successful Return to Live Events
With the roadmap to live events being shared this week, events teams up and down the country are now excitedly planning for summer soirees, corporate bashes, product launches, and dare we say it Christmas parties! Despite the news though, a great deal of uncertainty still remains, it wouldn’t be the first time the Government had made a u-turn would it now?
With that in mind, we’ve put together five top tips when putting together your event plan for the rest of the year, of course, you can always just give us a shout and we can take everything off your hands, but we’ll be following these tips too, on how to best approach planning your events in 2021.
Stay flexible
Although this week’s announcement is exciting, we all know everything can change very quickly. So try to be as flexible as possible with everything, especially when picking suppliers. Only work with suppliers who will offer changes to your booking like changing dates, or flipping it to virtual, at no additional cost.
Being able to adapt and change quickly is key this year, yes, it's difficult with events as we java such a long lead time, but you need to keep this flexibility front of mind.
Plan for virtual in the short term
Let’s be honest, even if the roadmap does go to plan, and stays on track - proper events won’t actually be back till late August/September. (Even though Reading Festival is going ahead he-hem). Small dinners and roundtables will be go-ers for the summer months, and garden parties will be a great shout, but to avoid any pitfalls, we’d say stick with virtual for now. We recently surveyed attendees on a virtual event asking whether they would prefer the next instalments to be virtual or face to face, and a resounding 70% said they would still prefer virtual.
Stay informed
Ok. We realise this is a no brainer but we can’t stress how important this is. With Government guidance changing daily, it’s important that you get advice from professionals to ensure you are working within the law and correct guidance. Keep subscribing to blogs like ours, and the knowledge you gain will allow you to stay ahead of the curve and help with the flexibility and adaptability we talked about above. Information is power, and having knowledge will help you to adapt more quickly.
Be prepared for Hybrid
Understand that everything is not going to just flip back to how things used to be. The last year has had a MASSIVE impact on people’s behaviour and outlook, with some being anxious about being close to people again, so it may be that lots of your audience just won’t want to attend an in-person event. Book venues that are tech-enabled and that have experience of running hybrid events.
Be safer
We’re not saying you weren't safe before, but the pandemic has brought us a whole new host of safety considerations we have to take into account. Measures need to be put in place to protect not only attendees, but venue staff, and ourselves to ensure everyone has confidence in attending. We’d suggest for you and your team to be trained up, or hire a company like ours to help you deliver your events safely. The Goho events team are CPD Safer Events Accredited and have to keep up to date with all changes to the guidance, so you know you’re in safe hands.
So, whilst this is a very exciting time, there is still lots to consider. It’s fabulous that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and people are thinking of live events again. We are already working on over 10 briefs, so things are certainly on the up, and this will give the hospitality industry a much-needed boost. Just don’t get caught out or caught short.
Drop us a line and we’d be happy to give you a quotation for your brief, talk through your ideas and vision or just lend some advice.
