Failing to plan, planning to fail....

Detailed planning of your event ensures that everyone knows what is happening, who is doing what and when things need to be done by in order to stay within timescale. Strategic planning will also ensure that you don't forget anything important, whether it is insurance and licencing or key publicity deadlines.

Careful planning will also ensure that your dates won't clash with other local and regional events or projects and that all relevant parties and partner organisations feel confident with your event. Just make sure you involve everyone in the planning process and circulate the information to all relevant parties.

How to plan?

Strategic Plans

Plans can be as big or small as you would like them to be. Ideally you would have an overall Business Plan, which is focused on the medium to long term strategic direction of your organisation. You may also wish to put together a Marketing Plan, which should include marketing your organisation, as well as marketing activity for specific events.

Operational Plans

It is advisable to have an Operations Plan (also called Event Management Plan) for the event, festival, or the carnival as this will outline all the practical roles and responsibilities of everyone who is involved in the organisation of the event in the 12 months leading up to the event.

There are numerous different ways to plan, but you may wish to include key areas of work, such as marketing, ticketing, venue, catering, logistics, site planning, licencing, technical, staffing etc and identify tasks related to each key area of work. Even for voluntary/community groups it will help by having team meetings whereby you go through your plans regularly and delegate responsibility to people in the team that have expertise or interest in a particular are (e.g. marketing, technical, artistic programming). This will ensure that the planning of the event runs smoothly and that all team members are kept informed of all aspects of the planning, so that nothing is duplicated or missed.

Timeline plan: put together a month by month plan of what needs to be done (determined by the Operations Plan) for 12 months prior to your event date. Some people prefer to do this in the format of a Gant chart.

Click here to visit Tourism North East website site for practical planning document examples.