Event Management: Making The Most of Your Events

Event management is crucial to making your events successful and meaningful. Whether you're planning a corporate gathering, a conference, or an internal meeting, how well you manage each component of the event can determine its overall impact. With a structured approach, you're able to create a smooth experience for your attendees, from invitations to follow-up, which ultimately builds credibility and engagement around your brand or initiative.

Beyond logistics, event management also brings a sense of purpose and direction to every event. Thoughtful planning allows you to customize the experience for different attendees, ensuring relevance and value for all participants. It’s more than just setting a date and time—it’s about curating an environment where meaningful connections are made, goals are achieved, and attendees walk away with a positive impression. 

What to Consider:

1. Targeted InvitationsOne key to successful event management is sending out targeted invitations to specific people based on work location or role type. This ensures that only the most relevant attendees are invited, minimizing inbox clutter and calendar conflicts. By choosing a platform with the ability to filter by both role type and location, carefully curating the guest list, you avoid overwhelming your team and ensure that those who need to be involved are notified in a timely manner.

2. Flexibility in Event Format: Another essential factor is deciding the format of your event: should it be in-person, online, or a hybrid of both? Each option offers distinct benefits. Online events make participation easier across different regions, while in-person gatherings allow for face-to-face networking. Hybrid events combine the best of both worlds, accommodating attendees with different preferences or travel restrictions. Deciding the right format early on ensures your event remains accessible and engaging. Choosing a platform that is as flexible as your organization allows a universal system that can be customized to the feel of your company. 

3. Invite Reminders: Timely reminders are crucial in keeping attendance rates high. Automated reminders sent a few days or hours before the event ensure participants don’t forget or miss important updates. These reminders can include critical details like time zone conversions, agenda updates, and links to virtual platforms. Sending multiple reminders also keeps the event top-of-mind, especially for busy attendees. Make sure your event platform can not only send reminders to those who RSVP’d, but also send reminders to people who have not RSVP’s, declined invitations, or gave a tentative response originally. 

4. Automatic Attendance Tracking: Streamlining the administrative side of event management is essential, and automatic attendance tracking is a powerful tool to help with this. It eliminates the need for manual tracking, allowing you to focus on more important aspects of the event. Attendees can be monitored with ease, making it simple to follow up with participants and gauge the event’s overall success. When choosing an event platform it is not enough to pick a platform that can simply take attendance of those who attend in the moment. You also need to include any person who watched the recording, after the fact. 

5. Centralized Storage of Notes, Attachments, and Files: With many moving parts, it’s important to keep your event documents organized. By centralizing all relevant notes, attachments, and files, you can ensure that everything needed for preparation, during the event, and post-event follow-up is easily accessible. Whether it’s sharing an agenda or distributing post-event materials, having a single hub for documentation simplifies the entire process.

6. Allow Internal Communities to Collaborate: When finding an event management platform, it is important to find one that allows for internal communties to co-host and collaborate on events. This increases the number of people who will see and attend the events, as well as build cross-cultural relationships between organizations, allow organizations to split the cost of events, and create a more unified approach to events. 

How to Best Use Office Raven:

1. Create Roles and People to Streamline Event Creation: Office Raven allows you to create specific roles and assign people to them, simplifying the process of building and managing events. By defining roles ahead of time, you’ll be able to quickly assemble your event teams and invite the right participants without going through the hassle of individual invitations each time. This structure ensures that everyone knows their responsibilities, making for smoother event execution.

2. Use the Approval Process to Minimize Confusion: Office Raven’s approval process is a key feature to reduce confusion and prevent unnecessary events from cluttering up schedules. By setting up an approval workflow, you can ensure that only relevant and well-planned events make it onto the calendar. This avoids overlapping schedules and helps your organization stay focused on high-priority events.

3. Sync to Your HRIS for Automatic Updates: Keeping track of changing employee lists can be a headache, especially for larger organizations. With Office Raven’s HRIS sync feature, your event management system is always up to date with your organization’s latest information. No more manual email list updates—just seamless integration that ensures your invite lists are always accurate and up-to-date.

4. Custom Event Fields: Tailor event management to your organization’s needs by creating custom event fields. These fields allow you to categorize and track the different types of events your organization hosts. Because they are fully customizable, they can be designed to align with the specific requirements and branding of your company’s events.

5. Volunteer Management: Streamline volunteer coordination by managing all event volunteers directly within the platform. You can create custom fields for each volunteer role and specify the number of volunteers needed. Volunteer opportunities are included with event invitations, enabling users to both RSVP and sign up for volunteer roles in one seamless process.

6. Speaker Management: With Teleksope’s platform, you can efficiently manage event speakers, incorporating an approval system to track speaker engagements and payments. This system integrates with the platform's budget module, giving event organizers real-time visibility into available funds for speaker fees.

7. Pre and Post-Event Follow-Ups: Create and send pre-event surveys to those attending events. This can be used to create focus groups, get data that can guide agenda and action items, and more! In addition, easily send post-event communications that include follow-up action items, survey links (which can be created and tracked within the platform), and additional resources. This functionality helps maintain engagement and gather feedback to improve future events.

8. Limit Attendance and Create Waitlists: In Office Raven, you can limit the online, in person, or hybrid number of spots for an event and create automatic waitlists.  The Limit Attendance feature allows organizers to cap the number of participants for an event, ensuring capacity is managed effectively. If the event reaches full capacity, the waitlist option will automatically place additional registrants in a queue, and then move them up if someone in the event changes their RSVP status. 

9. Automatic Attendance Tracking: Adding a zoom, teams, google meet, or any video conferencing link to the event will allow Office Raven to automatically track the attendance of everyone in the event. There is no need to screenshot the list or give  asurvey, the platform will automatically create a downloadable report of those who attended the event. After an event, you can upload the event recording directly to the platform. If participants miss the live event but later watch the recording, Office Raven will automatically update their attendance status to "attended," ensuring accurate tracking.

10. In-Person Attendance Tracking with QR Codes: For in-person events, there are two convenient attendance tracking options. The first is a manual check-in, where staff can verify attendance by looking up participant names at the registration desk. Alternatively, you can utilize the platform’s auto-generated QR codes. Attendees can simply scan the code with their smartphones, and their attendance will be instantly recorded in the system.

11. Collaborative Events: Collaborative events enable organizations to co-host activities with internal communities such as chapters, groups, and channels. This feature fosters teamwork across different departments or interest groups, allowing them to contribute to planning, promotion, and execution. By involving these communities, the event benefits from broader reach and engagement within the organization.

Effective event management goes beyond logistical coordination—it’s about creating meaningful experiences that engage participants and drive success. By leveraging tools like targeted invitations, flexible event formats, automated reminders, and attendance tracking, you can ensure a seamless event process from start to finish. Platforms like Office Raven offer invaluable features, such as streamlined volunteer management, speaker tracking, and post-event follow-ups, making it easier to keep everything organized and impactful. By adopting these strategies, you can ensure that your events are well-executed, purposeful, and leave a lasting impression on attendees.