Admin Apr 6, 2023 4:17:56 PM 7 min read

Getting ahead of your stressful event planning cycle

Every year it’s the same. You scramble and stress out about budget and planning for next year, execute to plan, and then you’re right back at it again planning for the upcoming year! It’s an eternal (and exhausting) hamster wheel that has burned out some of the best, most creative minds in our industry. 

Well, there’s a better way. 

Whether you're on a calendar or mid-year fiscal planning schedule, getting your corporate event strategy in place will not only lessen the stress, but will establish an ongoing, proactive planning cycle in sync with your organization’s fiscal year and supportive of your company’s strategic goals. 

It’s also a critical foundation to shared understanding and alignment, ensuring your team understands and is aligned to the priorities and careabouts of key stakeholders and leadership. Your team will also build interpersonal connections and shared accountability for execution success, working together to identify and clarify key audience and company outcomes, refine your ideal target audience, build out personas, and align to metrics that tie directly to company results.

Whether your existing event portfolio needs a refresh or you’re needing to develop a new strategy to innovate upcoming events, having a strategy in place is more important than ever in this now hyper-competitive environment. 

We all know that the pandemic changed how we work and engage with others, not to mention its other effects, including high pressure economic forces, reduced budgets, and a dampened enthusiasm for business travel. But what it didn’t change was the tactics required to create engagement, awe, business impact and differentiate your event from the many competing for your audience’s time and attention. 

There are very high expectations for what your events should deliver in terms of value, professional advancement, learning, and networking. It’s critical to take a proactive approach in evolving your events and pushing them to the next level. Once your event is aligned to critical goals, you’ll be well positioned to explore and evolve the attendee journey, bring innovation to your experience concepting and design, and be supported in developing a content framework and messaging, topics, speakers and formats to inform marketing and promotional strategies. Your stressful, chaotic event planning process is now a streamlined, strategic machine.

So how do you optimize your existing event portfolio or create a new event strategy? This is where Event Strategists come in. They guide you, your team, and your stakeholders through interactive workshops and consulting sessions to develop and document your foundational narrative, using industry insights and research to review your mix of events and help identify gaps and opportunities based on desired results and target audiences. They help you realign to goals, outcomes and audiences.  

With a proactive event strategy and plan, you’ll be able to:

  • Execute with increased efficiency and greater impact 
  • Align proactively with leadership and stakeholders
  • Articulate how event activity is reaching desired audiences and driving business impact
  • Plan in sync with your organization’s fiscal year and a comprehensive understanding of the resources and funding necessary (and available) 
  • Align audiences and events to business goals to ensure your event reporting is meaningful to stakeholders 

At Impact Point Group, we specialize in helping event leaders design and create an effective event strategy. Led by our expert team of event strategists, our interactive workshops and consulting engagements have helped many enterprise size event teams bring order to the chaos by shaping a corporate event strategy for their teams, gain support and budget buy-in, and reduce costs, and find operational efficiencies. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you get started on your event strategy.

#eventstrategy #eventportfoliostrategy #impactpoint #impactpointgroup