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Hosting an event is a fantastic way to further your journey as a leader. It can give you an opportunity to share your knowledge, to network with others, and perhaps to make some money too. But if you’ve never planned and hosted an event before, the whole concept can seem pretty daunting. Where do you even start? It’s vital to cover your bases and build an event that not only does what you want it to do but also makes your attendees happy. If you’re thinking of planning your first leadership event, here are some of the things you might want to think about.
Focus on Selling Tickets
Obviously, if you’re hoping to make money from your event, or at least break even, you need to sell tickets. Selling as many tickets as possible isn’t necessarily your main goal, especially if you have limited capacity or want to keep it small. But you do need to ensure you have people coming to your event. Start by ensuring you’re using a good ticket selling service so that it’s easy to sell your tickets. You want to make it easier for people to buy them and ensure you can manage them easily too.
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Think of the Needs of Attendees
You need to put the needs of your attendees first if you want to create a successful leadership event. The first thing to start with is, of course, what sort of content and activities they’re hoping to see. Are they looking for single speakers, panels, workshops, or other formats that will allow them to learn and engage? But you also need to think about their other wants and needs, ranging from providing basic facilities to offering food and drink. You want to make sure you take care of them so that they have a good experience.
Invite Other Speakers
When you’re setting up a leadership event, you might want to put yourself center-stage. You might be giving a talk as the main event, but you should also consider what else you’re going to offer your audience. Inviting other speakers is not only a good way to provide more value to your audience but it’s also an excellent way to network with other people. You can make use of your existing contacts to invite people to speak, and you could also reach out to people you’re less familiar with to ask them if they want to be part of your event.
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Engage Your Audience
Take any opportunity to engage your audience during your event. This might involve running workshops where they can join in with the discussion and learn new skills. Or it could be having Q&A sessions at the end of a talk. You could give people the opportunity to submit questions in advance so that they don’t have to stand up and ask their questions in front of the audience. This can double up as a good way to prepare your speakers and consider different topics.
Plan your first event carefully to check off all of the important boxes that it will require.
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