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How to win at constantly staging bigger and better events?

The month of September always marks the anniversary for Eventeamwork. This year we are celebrating 8 years and I have taken a moment to stop and reflect on the journey.

I am extremely proud of my amazing team that I got to work with over these years. I am grateful to our clients for trusting us and the process. I am inspired by the amazing outcomes our clients achieved. I am grateful for the incredible experiences and learnings along the way.

Being in business has its own various challenges but the most challenging part for me has been to keep standing for a different approach to leading people in our fast paced and process-oriented industry.

As Event Managers these days, we are not taught people management and leadership except for basic HR principles. The focus is on learning about operations, which is important but not enough. Once we enter the industry, we quickly see that people form a large part of the industry and even entry level roles often need to supervise teams of casual staff or volunteers.

It is no wonder then that the operational focus that requires short term thinking and efficiencies often dictates how people are managed in events.

The downside of efficiency

The operational phase of events tends to be tactical and task focused, including a constant search for immediate solutions – hiring structures and stages, using systems, automating tasks – and in amongst all of this we will see the search for immediate solutions to cover tasks to be done and this is where the search for help often comes in and with it the well-known “Call for volunteers”.

This approach stands in direct opposite to the principles of effective engagement, which focusses on long-term benefits through creating stronger bonds, not only with staff and volunteers but also with customers, participants, suppliers, sponsors and other stakeholders – in short with the event’s market, with everyone the event touches.

Yet the operational approach prevails because that’s all we get exposed to through education and through the people we work with in the industry. It tends to treat the people who willingly give their time for an event as a commodity, basically treating them the same as the marquee we are hiring. But it’s just what we have been taught to do.

However, this approach doesn’t just negate the value people who volunteer for your event bring to you, it also does a huge disservice to the event.

The result is that people who volunteer are not engaged, meaning they don’t turn up or they don’t return, which then cements the idea that volunteers are unreliably – closing the circle. A common request then is to find other or new volunteers.

But the same approach will always just lead to the same outcomes.

We need a new leadership approach

Event volunteers make up 60+% of any event workforce and they are predominantly engaged in customer facing roles. They talk about your event not only to your customers and participants, but also to their friends and the wider community – basically creating the event brand. If they feel engaged, they will happily share that but if they don’t feel engaged, heard and supported they will also share and create a potentially unfavourable image of your event in the community.

Events are always looking to be bigger and better, typically with the vision behind to create a bigger impact, the very reason why they were created in the first place.

This immense drive and the hard work people put in to create events is what attracted me to the industry in the first place.

What I learned is that to achieve a greater impact we need to engage our people. We can’t do it alone. The 60+% of our workforce can be so much more than bodies implementing tasks – if we allow them to and support them to – essentially leading them effectively.

Effective leadership creates higher engagement and retention, which reduces costs, but it also elevates the event community building, allows for a greater reach, attracts more of the right people and it impacts people and their communities.

Leadership is taking responsibility and involving people strategically rather than as a short-term fix. If leaders are able to look inward and recognise their role in this, they can significantly change the culture of an organisation and accelerate the impact they make. It always starts at the top.

So, yes it can be sometimes challenging to challenge the status quo, but what I love is seeing leaders succeed and achieve the big impact they want to make. Here is to many more years of transforming event leadership.

Do you really know your event stakeholders?

stakeholder management

If you’re planning a large-scale event, you’ll already know that they don’t ‘just happen’. And of course, the more stakeholders you have, the more potential there is for interests to compete and for you to struggle to satisfy them all.

In this post, I’ll show you why it’s important to really know your stakeholders and share some easy tips to help get to know them better.

No doubt, you already know your stakeholders are important and you are already thinking about them and their interests. This simple process will help you clarify how you can engage them more effectively.

Who are your stakeholders?

Large-scale events usually involve a staggering number of stakeholders from advisory boards to suppliers to temporary staff and volunteers (the latter can constitute up to 85% of the event workforce). There are many different people with whom event leaders must interact to successfully stage the best possible event. The best advice here is to really know your stakeholders and (perhaps even more importantly) to understand what’s in it for them.

Why it’s important to know your stakeholders

Don’t assume that all of your stakeholders are anxious to just be part of a big happy family. Getting to know your stakeholders helps you balance different priorities and competing interests, make use of everyone’s strengths and talents and help everyone feel valued and engaged. It’s the first step in getting everyone to work together for that common goal – a successful event.

List your stakeholders

To get to know your stakeholders, the first step is to list them. That may sound like an easy task, but many event leaders skip this simple step, which can not only mean that they fail to engage with key stakeholders, they can accidentally ignore them completely. Naturally, this can make them feel neglected, disengaged and more self-interested as a result.

What’s driving your stakeholders?

To make sure you engage with all your stakeholders, in addition to listing their names and contact information, add something even more valuable: your stakeholders’ motivations.

Consider what interest each stakeholder has in the event. Ask yourself, “What’s driving my stakeholders?” The answers may vary depending upon each stakeholder’s unique situation, but they are certainly worth knowing and including on your list.

Various stakeholders will have different motivations which may or may not align with your objectives. A politician involved in your event might want to drum up good publicity. A bureaucrat may be looking to capitalise on the potential for your event to attract new business to the area. An operations team member might be using the event as a stepping stone for their next gig. Volunteers may simply be looking for meaningful experiences and personal fulfilment. The list goes on and on.

Determine ‘what’s in it for them’ and add this to your list. Doing so will help you to build a more meaningful relationship with each individual stakeholder as well as to mediate their competing interests when functioning collectively.

Simone and the big top

A colleague of mine (I’ll call her Simone) was helping to stage a major student music event in a town in Victoria. Without a major concert hall, a big top was used for the event and was erected on the town’s showground. The old adage ‘never work with children or animals’ was frequently playing in Simone’s mind, reminding her of what she was taking on.

She described her list of stakeholders as ‘more than a little bit lengthy’. Apart from the obvious – students, teachers and parents – there were many others on her list, such as the owners of the big top (who were wanting to use this event for promoting their company and to ensure that their prize possession wasn’t ruined by all those kids), the Showground Trust (who were wanting some publicity for the showground but were also concerned that their oval was going to be ruined), suppliers (who provided everything from trapeze swings and sound gear to toilets, and who managed everything from ticketing and parking to crowd control), the local ambos, the state and federal members of parliament (who were from different parties, but both wanted to speak at the event), local newspaper and television film crews … every woman and her dog.

Even though Simone thought she was across all her stakeholders, once she had taken the time to list the stakeholders and their motivations, she thought it was absolutely worth it. It enabled her to engage with all of the stakeholders effectively and to streamline communication, but most of all to ensure that their seemingly competing interests were harnessed. The result was that stakeholders were very engaged across the entire event, which lead to a successful three-day event and happy stakeholders who are all likely to return next year.

Ready to get to know your stakeholders?

Create a list of your stakeholders, their contact information and their motivations. Use these tools to help you be more effective in managing their competing interests.

If you’d like to up-level your stakeholder engagement, download our free checklist “How to manage competing stakeholder interests when running large scale events”.

2013 Special Olympics – one week, 3500 volunteers

2013 Special Olympics

One of our biggest events last year was the Special Olympics 2013 Asia Pacific Games (SOAPG 2013), held in Newcastle in the first week of December.

The Games was one of the largest community events the Hunter region has ever seen, with 2500 athletes competing from 29 nations, 600 officials and an estimated 200,000 visitors – all adding up to an injection of more than $20 million for the local economy.

Eventeamwork was engaged by the Games team to run the volunteer program, which was sponsored by ClubsNSW. The team came up with the idea of ‘Volunteer Champions’, a program which invited local businesses to promote the games and the opportunity to volunteer.

It proved an excellent way to secure local engagement, and ClubsNSW drove a huge local campaign through over 100 clubs in the region to attract a group of 25 Volunteer Champions, including organisations that already had a strong commitment to community partnerships and that could tap into large member or volunteer bases. The Champions really got behind the Games, not only promoting the event but giving their employees time to participate.

One Champion, Hunter TAFE, won funding from State Training Services to fund a Certificate II in Tourism for up to 350 volunteers, and ClubsNSW ran the campaign to encourage volunteers to take the training.

This year, the outstanding support of ClubsNSW was acknowledged when they won the award for Outstanding Regional Initiative at the 2014 Clubs & Community Awards.
We at Eventeamwork are extremely proud to see this kind of recognition for the efforts of the local community – it was so inspiring to see so many local businesses and individuals jump on board to support the Special Olympics and make it such a successful event – not just for the region and its businesses, but for all the athletes, the spectators and the fantastic cohort of volunteers.

The ‘Volunteer Champions’ concept set a high standard for similar events and, according to Jon Chin, the Newcastle & Hunter Representative of ClubsNSW, the model is being used by organisers of other major events in the region and beyond.