10 Tips to Acquire a Sponsorship for Your Next Event

If you are an event planner, you may have already understood that just having a great idea for an event is not enough to ensure its success. You need to focus on many aspects that will draw your expected audience or participants to your event. The most important matter in event planning is raising funds so that you can execute your event in an acceptable and appreciable way. There are many organizations and individuals who sponsor events for various reasons. If you can find the right sponsors and convince them to sponsor your event, you can ensure that adequate funds are available to pull off your event comfortably. Here are some tips that may help you in finding the right sponsors for your events:

1. Plan your event in thorough detail. How you would like it to be. What the goals are that you intend to achieve through the success of your event. Whether you are planning a convention or some other business event, it needs careful planning.
2. Identify the individuals, businesses, and organizations that may benefit most from sponsoring your event. For example, if you are hosting a fashion show, you should look at clothing retailers, shoe retailers, hair and make-up experts and modeling coaches in your neighborhood as potential sponsors. 
3. Choose a venue that gives your sponsors maximum exposure.
4. Walk through the venue trying to visualize where your sponsors will be able to place banners, signs and other promotions. Be creative in your event marketing.
5. Check websites or talk to those informed for more information about whom you should contact in the organizations you have zeroed in on. Often, securing a good sponsor is only done when you speak to the right person.
6.  Draft a proposal that explains everything about your event, its objectives and your proposed strategies for the benefit of your prospective sponsors. Share all the relevant details with your potential sponsors. You could offer different levels of sponsorships as some organizations may not be able to donate as much as others. The incentives they get in return could be in proportion to their investment.
7. Meet up with your potential sponsors in person by an appointment. Provide all the information they need, in person, to decide whether they should sponsor the event or not.
8.  One of the best ways by which you can induce prospective sponsors to support your event is to enumerate the various benefits and incentives that they can get.
9. If you have created a website for your event, include a page that features your sponsors. If you have created an event in a social networking site, add a link to their website. 
10. Your focus should be on maintaining good relations with your sponsors at all times to ensure sponsorship for your upcoming events. Networking is an integral part of any successful business event planning.

Finding sponsors for any type of event can be a challenge. Be sure to clearly express your gratitude to each of your sponsors.
A lot more needs to be in place to make sure your event is a success. If you are looking for an event management company to handle the nitty-gritty of your event, log in to: http://planaheadevents.com.

Using Technology During Your Event To Create Connections

Technology has become such an integral part of our daily life that it is fair to say that we are living a digital lifestyle. Although technology has connected people from far flung corners of the earth and has given people so many more ways to communicate with each other, it is often made out to be the reason for disconnect between people who live in the same house or city. But from a business standpoint, technology helps by providing several capability leveraging factors. Thanks to technology, businesses now have an overwhelming number of options to improve their marketing, inter-staff communication and various other communication activities. Right from using Facebook or other internet sites for their event marketing to email campaigns, podcasts, webinars, and a lot more, adopting cutting-edge technologies for your business events can be a great idea for your organization. The public often associates this as an indication of the cutting-edge quality that the company’s services or products may have.

Using the latest technology to market your wares directly to your potential customers is in vogue. Right from the eatery next door to the biggest company at a tradeshow, everyone is out to put technology to good use in connecting to their customer base. Right from utilizing the simple SMS functionality from your mobile phone to text your customers about some event, up to tweeting your latest achievement or announcing your forthcoming events on Facebook, everything goes towards connecting with and / or maintaining ties with your esteemed customers. For example, a pizzeria could text its customers about a discount on certain pizzas during certain hours on a certain day. Even during tradeshows or any events by reputed event management companies, you can put to use myriad ways of connecting with potential customers to generate an interest in them regarding your organization or its products and to engage them using the latest technologies. For example, you could tweet out information that will lure people to your booth at the tradeshow and get them to register with you for upcoming events. Even being seen using a state-of-the-art, sleek tablet or iPad will do volumes for your image building.

Technology really is making the world a smaller place. You really need to decide quickly whether you want to join them or be left behind. That said, you will have to do your groundwork before you jump onto this bandwagon. Which technology suits your organization’s requirements best depends on the clientele you are looking at. For example, texting or tweeting will help most if you are a franchise owner of a Pizza shop or something similar that clicks with the younger generation. If your clientele is ladies over the age of fifty, then you need to change tack to emails or other such modes of communication.

If you are looking for a reputed event planning company that will ensure that you get sufficient opportunities to connect with your customers and other stake holders, log onto planaheadevents.com.

Use Facebook To Promote Your Events

The number of participants and their feedback are the key indicators of the success of an event. The first step to ensure a high turnout for your event, whether it is a baseball tournament, a concert, a seminar, or a cricket match is proper marketing and promotion. Companies all over the world use various online and offline strategies to ensure maximum attendance for their events. All sorts of promotional materials like advertisements, banners, billboards, pamphlets, to name a few, are printed and distributed in large numbers to attract attendees to an event. In recent times, the method of promoting an event using the internet has gained ground. Companies the world over are using various online promotional tools to make people aware of their products and services. One of the most popular event marketing tools of recent times is Facebook.

 

At the start of 2012, Facebook boasted of approximately 800 million active users. These users live, practically, in all the corners of the earth and are of all ages, sizes, colors and types. This makes Facebook one of the best media for communication, marketing and advertising. Although it was launched as a social networking site, Facebook is now wearing a lot more hats. Being a free site – one that assures all its users that it will always be free of cost – makes it very lucrative to use as a communication and marketing medium. You get the chance to communicate with all the millions of users for free. Besides the site is extremely user-friendly, making it easy to open or manage an account or to publish an event. Nowadays, many companies are promoting their events and activities through Facebook so as to inform and attract a large number of attendees. Whether you are an event management company or are just planning a corporate event for your organization, you too can use this extremely popular networking site to create a buzz around your events and activities.

Facebook has provided all its users with an innovative application called Events that allows users to create and publish an Events page on Facebook. You can use this Events page to invite your Friends on Facebook to participate in your event, and also send Reminders to them about it. Your invitees can let you know whether they will attend the event or not. There is even a provision of selecting ‘Maybe’ which can be used when the invitee is not sure of whether he/she can participate in your event or not. The best part is that this utility on Facebook is absolutely free, and all those who have a Facebook account, can register for the event using the same page. Regardless of whether you are into corporate event planning for yourself or your clients, if you want more people to get to know about your event, you can make it a Public event so that anyone searching for similar events will find yours too. You could also ask your friends to share a link to the event on their Facebook pages. In this way, the word about your event will spread throughout the network. Facebook Events has a lot more facilities that you can utilize to produce brand or event awareness across the world.

If you are looking for a topnotch company that will manage all the aspects of event management for you, log onto http://planaheadevents.com/ .

Using LinkedIn To Promote Your Next TradeShow

In recent times, LinkedIn has emerged as a one stop solution to a lot of corporate malaises. Anybody and everybody, who is somebody in the corporate world, has resorted to LinkedIn for some interest or the other at some time or the other. Everyone seems to have realized the power and value of LinkedIn. It is not your run-of-the-mill social networking channel where you find people talking about what cuisine they are about to enjoy, etc. but is a website dedicated to professionals who want to move ahead in their careers. Although you could use it to find a job too, it is not limited to just being a forum for first time job-seekers. In fact, the visibility that LinkedIn provides will allow you to do your event marketing and satisfy your need for publicity, all in one place. In fact, the facility of event marketing has made LinkedIn a boon to professionals.

Using any social networking site to market or promote your upcoming tradeshow may not work as well as using LinkedIn because not all sites have users providing their professional details. Other sites may not help you in leveraging your event like LinkedIn can since it is one of the largest professional networks on the internet. So whether you are targeting professionals anywhere in the world by announcing your event on LinkedIn, whatever event you are thinking of, LinkedIn will direct a lot of attention to it. Once you are done with your corporate event planning, it will allow you to plan a virtual event and to select the industry to which your tradeshow or event belongs. It will allow you to preview your event before you publish it, enabling you to review your event. You can select the audience for your tradeshow.

Once you have added an event, LinkedIn will automatically promote it to all the people you are connected with, based on the industry to which the event belongs. Each time someone accepts the invite, their network is updated with the news. So, in effect, LinkedIn alerts your entire network and each confirmation spreads word about the event further displaying a kind of viral effect. You have free access to over 160 million professionals, who are also there to further their own corporate careers and are on the lookout for better prospects in any form. This will make those in your field eager to participate in any event, whether virtual or real, that gives them publicity, which in turn will make your tradeshow a sure success.

If you want to get in touch with a topnotch event management company, log onto Planaheadevents.com.

Tips For Holding Your Next Team Meeting

You have just had the honor of being assigned the task of managing an important event. You get your team together and, after a few brainstorming sessions, you try to map out your plans for the prestigious event,. But even after a week or so, your plans arestill not finalized and most of your team members do not have any idea of what to expect or what is expected of them. This is  not an uncommon scenario and in no way reflects on the competence level of the manager or the team. After all, it’s not like you work for an event planning company. It is just a matter of knowing a few tips to make your meetings more productive:

Always have an agenda in place before you call for a meeting.  The agenda should have a list of all the points or topics that need to be discussed during the meeting.

The manager needs to act as facilitator who makes sure that all the points on the agenda should be addressed without wastage of time on any one point and neither should any point be missed. Points that are not on the agenda and do not pertain to the tasks at hand, should be made note of and discussed in a later session.

One person from the team should be designated to make note of the minutes of the meeting. A copy of this should be sent to each person from the team so that he / she is reminded of their responsibilities.

 

For successful corporate event planning,the manager should make sure that every task is assigned to at least one person and each person should have a clear understanding of what he/she must do to.

Each task should be clearly defined, either in the same meeting or later in one-on-one meetings between the manager and that team member and deadlines should be defined and set. It is a good idea to get the team’s feedback on the status of the project on a regular basis.

Frequent meetings may be a drain on the time of the team members. A good manager needs to ensure that the team spends more time working on projects rather than in meetings. Email updates should be enough to update the manager and the rest of the team about the status of each task.

Or to make it easier on you, you could hire a professional corporate event plannerthat will help you with everything from the budgeting and planning to the execution and evaluation of your event. This will free you and your team from the hassles of organizing the event so that you can focus on the work that you are best at. You will just need to be available to give your input and act in a supervisory capacity to make sure the event management consultants stay on track with your event. A good event manager will leave no stone unturned in making sure your event is a resounding success.

If you are looking for a reputed corporate event planner, log onto to planaheadevents.com.