Tips to plan your nonprofit’s best-ever conference — with less stress
In my role as a Nonprofit Virtual Assistant (NPVA®), conference/event planning has become one of my specialties. I’ve worked on large national conferences with hundreds of attendees and annual retreats with less than 50 participants. Whether I’m engaged to handle one or two aspects of an event, or I have a lead role, overseeing the efforts of a multi-person planning committee, there are several best practices I recommend. In my experience, they’re the key to producing a meaningful and memorable event for your attendees and making the planning process a smooth one for everyone involved:
Assemble Your Team
Ideal team size and make-up depend on the size of your event and your organization, but typically you’ll need one lead person tasked with oversight, plus individuals to manage major components like venue selection and coordination, event promotion, event registration and programming.
Delegate from the Beginning
If one person has more responsibility than they can handle and doesn’t ask for help until they find they are drowning, it can be very challenging to right the ship. Involving enough people and having them own their roles from the beginning results in a much less stressful process.
Determine a Budget
A stated goal of “keeping costs as low as possible” will not be as effective as giving each person on your planning team a budget for their area of responsibility. A mandate of spending the least in every area means different things to different people and pressure to save pennies in every area may not produce the quality you want. A specific budget or budget range enables your team members to eliminate fluff, and focus spending on the areas where you’ll get the highest ROI.
Use What’s Worked
It can be tempting to make change for change’s sake, but if something worked well for you in the past, I recommend you keep doing it! Limit your changes to areas that your previous year conference debrief identified as areas for improvement. Your change of venue or your new line-up of speakers will already make your event feel fresh and new.
Establish Detailed Checklists and Milestones
Of course, most aspects of conference planning include multiple moving parts that are time sensitive. Each person managing a part of the planning should be tasked with producing a list of all their required deliverables, breaking them down into their component tasks, and assigning due dates and responsible parties to each step. Many venues have an event coordinator to assist customers and I highly recommend contacting them to review all your venue’s specific services, requirements and deadlines.
Communicate and Document
One of the most critical elements to a well-coordinated event is setting up a way for everyone involved in planning to share what they are doing and see what colleagues are doing in real time. This can be done using Google docs or project management software like Asana. Google docs allow for sharing and collaboration. A program like Asana has added features like pushing out reminders and alerts as deadlines approach or automatically revising all dependent deadlines if something early in the process must be pushed back. Some individuals may initially resist sharing their information with the group, or regularly updating milestone statuses, but this transparency can be tremendously valuable in ensuring things don’t fall through the cracks. For example, planning for your AV needs is key to any smooth-running conference program, but does ownership for AV belong to the venue lead or the programming lead? You don’t want to run the risk that no one is on top of a critical need like this one.
Once your event has concluded to rave reviews, you’ll want to make sure all your planning checklists, meeting notes and documents are archived so they can serve as the foundation of your plan for the following year. When tasks like choosing vegan menu options are included in your conference planning docs, they’ll be remembered year after year.
Does your nonprofit’s conference planning committee lack someone with a needed skillset? Has one of last year’s key committee members left the organization? Could you use an experienced person to take the lead in planning so you can focus on programming? A Nonprofit Virtual Assistant can be the answer to any of these needs.
Set up a call with our Nonprofit Virtual Assistant Program Manager to discuss what you may need.