11.2. Bringing Ideas to Life
You and your team have decided on a theme or topic of your event, and now it’s time to work out the details. Those details include things like where the event will be hosted, who will be speaking, and what kind of sessions will be the main focus of your event. The next few sections of this chapter will teach you more about how these things all fit together.
Considering Size (or Scale)
It’s important to know how large an event is going to be (its scale) so that you can accurately estimate what size venue you need to reserve, how many sessions you’ll need, and what kind of invited speakers you want to include. The challenge, however, is that you may not know what size event space you need to reserve until you determine what kind of sessions and speakers can/will attend. And sometimes those decisions are tough to make until you know how many people are going to attend. But you have to tell the folks who have been invited some kind of detail (like location and at least a little bit about what to expect) before they decide to spend money on your event.
It’s a bit circular, isn’t it?
Important Considerations
Before we can decide on who is speaking and what the session structure will be, we need to consider a few things:
- Number of attendees: Are we inviting 20 company leaders for a planning retreat? Or are we planning to have the most membership in the Society for Neuroscience (upwards of 35,000 people)?
- Event Duration: How long will this event be? A weekend is suitable for a corporate retreat, but a science conference may need to last an entire week.
- Event Type: Casual workshops, Corporate retreats, and industry conferences all have different needs.
Those three things are factors to consider when we mention scale.
Where to Host
We will discuss all of the necessary components to consider in the following sections, but let’s start with the venue and the location where your event will be held. Because event spaces are not always easy to find, this is likely the first decision that will need to be made once you’ve determined the type of event, how long it will last, and how many people you anticipate hosting.
As the Office Administrator, you are not likely to be the one who makes the decision about a venue, but you’re going to be the person in the office who narrows down the options and presents them to the decision maker. You will need to contact event spaces and find out what they have to offer.
