Most event planners struggle with having lots of essential tasks that need to be carried out with great detail to ensure the smooth flow of their events. For example, managing the signups and registrations, organizing the guests, sorting out billing and invoices and many other common tasks that are somewhat repetitive. To make things way more efficient and save you some time, it would be better to look into parts of event planning that you can automate.
☑ #1 Managing Seating
The seating is can usually be quite a tricky thing to manage. If you’re hosting an event with many of your guests coming from different fields or backgrounds, you may want to seat them together, to increase interaction between guests. Instead of manually assigning seats, you can automate your signup process in a way that seating will be assigned based on a selected criterion in the guest’s profile, like their occupation, their academic background or even their fields of interest. This way, you can automatically arrange their seating, without having to crack your head over where to seat whom.
☑ #2 Billing & Invoices
Billing and invoices are another part of event planning that can leave event planners in a twist. You can’t possibly keep track of every single billing email that you get from multiple vendors and suppliers without spending hours sorting them out. What you can do here is to automate it instead. Link your email address to an event planning software and you would be able to add tags to your email from it. With these tags, you can sort out the billing emails and at the same time, assign them to different categories that you can access with a single click.
☑ #3 Event Registration
Signups and registrations are the simplest event tasks to automate. You can quickly organize a simple signup process directly from your website or have your guests signup via an email link. These processes should then link back to your event management software, which will then store the details and automatically issue a seating provision and a ticket, which can be sent via email or text, depending on the guest’s preference. Signups and registrations can also be done via a self-check-in kiosk, which can also print out a form of confirmation, either a booking slip or a guest bracelet, allowing guests to complete this process in the shortest amount of time.
☑ #4 Event Promotions & Invitations
Email automation software are aplenty these days and they come in handy for a lot of event planning and marketing aspects involving emails. All you need to do is to link or upload your list of signups onto the email automation platform and from there, you can begin sending out scheduled emails to almost anyone. The best thing is that most of these platforms allow you to customize your emails so you can design them from scratch or upload your own email script. You can send out your event promotions, coupons, newsletter and even your event invitations and confirmations using this method.
☑ #5 Data Analysis & Reporting
The other part of event planning that is often overlooked until much too late is the data analysis. Your data from guest signups, confirmed attendees and sales numbers give you important insights that help you gauge the success of your event as a whole. All these details can be linked to or organized directly by an event management software, which usually has built-in features to help you manage these fronts of event planning. The software can then automatically generate periodical reports and graphs directly from the dashboard, allowing you to effectively analyze your data in a more optimized view. You can also access historical data and compare your current statistics with your past numbers, giving you a good comparison between your event effectively.
With these simple automation steps, you would actually be taking care of the bulk of your event planning tasks. This will leave you with more time to focus on the finer details of your event and make sure that nothing is missed out. Aside from that, automations like these can also help to increase efficiency and productivity, by assisting you and your team with menial and repetitive tasks that can be a bit of a chore. We do hope that these tricks will be of help in your event planning process. Good luck!
