14/11/2024
7 events in 10 business days across 3 continents? 😱
Yep, that's been my past few weeks. And four more events in the next few weeks.
You can't wing something like that, so how do you not only survive, but thrive?
Here is what we did:
💡 Templates, templates, templates 💡
Our event series had templates for everything — marketing site, agenda, sponsor benefits, speaker and sponsor displays, and even core sessions. Cities were free to localize all sessions, including language and customer stories. Our ticketing system was templatized and each city had a specific set of checklists we followed.
💡 Leaning into local teams 💡
In addition to empowering local city teams, we identified regional leads for our technical partner.
Then when the live event came around we’d have someone “in time zone” who had a good understanding of the event tech side of things.
💡 Strong documentation and playbook 💡
Onsite ex*****on was managed through an extensive onsite playbook that not only listed out key contacts and production timelines, but also detailed exactly what we expected to be tested and validated during setup, ensuring that even somebody walking into our events for the first time knew exactly what was expected.
💡 Asynchronous communication tools 💡
We used an online project management tool and Slack to communicate with our city teams in the leadup to the event. By keeping things out of email and in these tools, it gave visibility to the larger team, meaning anyone on our distributed team could pick up a ticket at any time to keep things quickly moving forward.
Overall, I think our system worked really well — I won’t lie. There are some places where I’d like to tighten up the documentation, but it generally worked. If I could control the schedule, I certainly wouldn’t put five events in the same week again, but it’s been incredible knowing that it’s possible.
For you – wherever you are in your events journey – templates and processes are your friend.
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