Event planners rely on great vendors to make the events we manage a success. We are typically highly organized, type A personalities and we expect our vendors to be as organized as we are. I am sure you have some horror stories about dealing with vendors that maybe weren’t [...]

Event planners and event managers are often tasked with creating the food and beverage budget for conferences or meetings and it’s usually a very significant part of the total event budget. While at first this number may seem like a lot of money, it can literally get eaten up [...]

As event managers there are so many parts of our job that are completely out of our control and we often have to make in-the-moment decisions based on little available information. I recently experienced that first hand, when an hour before our client’s event was scheduled to begin, the [...]

Let’s look at a hypothetical situation. Your client read my article “Not Another Boring Conference Room: Bringing Your Event to a Unique Venue” and was inspired to choose a unique venue for their event. To an event manager a unique venue would be defined as one that uses a [...]

More and more conferences now have an exhibitor trade show. A trade show is a great addition to a conference as it provides an opportunity for your delegates to network and also provides additional sponsorship and revenue opportunities for the conference. However, as an event manager this adds another [...]

We have all managed established events in which we have been involved since the start. We have our records on file from previous years, we’ve formed relationships with the committees and have experience working with the venue. We feel like we could plan the event with our eyes closed. [...]

Event managers are typically highly organized, which is crucial to managing complex events. Organization is important, but how you deal with issues as they arise is just as, if not more, vital. As event managers, we are familiar with Murphy’s Law: “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” [...]

As event managers we often get stuck in a rut of using the same venues year after year committed to the saying “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Many of the events we plan are annual events where the same people attend year after year. The program changes [...]

In the event management world we all utilize a Critical Path filled with details, deadlines and delegations. You create the critical path to keep you on track and distribute it to your team, but then what? It is your job, as the event manager to manage the deadlines and have [...]