7 essential competencies of the full-stack Event Manager
What are the skills you need to be sure you’re ready to become a full-term Event Manager?
6 minute read | How do you know if you’re truly prepared to tackle challenges that seem simple, but can actually grow into significant problems on event management? When we feel insecure about our skills, we feel neglected and tend to be less efficient. Expanding your strategic thinking as an Event Manager will make you understand how to handle uncomfortable feelings and target your development to the right objectives.
In this post, you’ll learn how to identify 7 competencies a full-stack Event Manager on a quick digest. Merge into it and incorporate these tactics on your work, as well as in your life.
1. Get to know strategic thinking.
Begin from getting to know what is the strategic imperative of an event. This allows you to bring the strategy down to events-marketing and provides clarity into the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. We speak about it in detail, in the post: outlining what is the event planning schedule for any kind of conference.
2. Embrace customer experience.
Customer-centric cultures are not a choice anymore, it’s a must. And the events sector probably the most customer-centered industry of all, specialists say. Understanding the job to be done by your guest, at the right moment, allow you to take the right approach and create can`t miss experiences. If you don’t know what the definition of event industry or want to refresh, our post “MICE Tourism: what is it and what these travellers look for” distills the aspects you need to know.
3. Understand technology.
Good news is: you don’t need to learn code. But you need a high level of exploring and understanding skills to make the most out of your tool. Most of these tools are developed with the customer in mind, so there’s no need to be afraid. What you need to avoid, by any means, is being tech-resistant. You need to be able to work with what people are working too. That not only build you a tech-savvy and up to date image, but makes it way easier for continuous learning. When it comes to coding homework, having a high level of exploring and understanding skills is crucial to make the most out of the tools at your disposal.
4. Re-imagine event processes.
The digital transformation moves quickly. In many cases, you may not only need to improve a process, but also completely recreate it. To be successful, you need to understand event processes, how to analyze results, develop new ways to produce more while spending less, and drive results to your client / manager / company. Start from Event Registration, Ticketing and Check-in, since those are processes you’ll need to handle on every occasion.
5. Enthusiastically receive agility on project management.
Firstly, understand concepts and stages of project management. The most important include: briefing, team definition, vendors needed, schedule, budget and workflow. If you still didn’t have a look at it, open the “Event schedule for any kind of conference” post now. Secondly, embrace agility with methods such as Scrum or Kanban and learn the tools to apply it. It might sound fancy and complicated, but you can literally learn it in one day. That’s the kind of process that not only streamlines your workflow, but can even end up reshaping your whole organizational culture. You don’t need to know how to use every single tool that shows up in the market, just the right ones.
6. Strong and continuously communicate with stakeholders.
Even if you’re working on distance, save time for at least a weekly meeting with your client. With you team and vendors, that should be even more constant. You, the Event Manager, know like no one else that the pace when planning an event is crazy. Besides, changes happen all the time. It’s tempting to make a surprise and leave it all to be shown on the great day, but don’t do it. Your client has expectations, even when they don’t know what are those. So stakeholder engagement is core for success. Ask for frequent feedback, on every work phase.
7. Make strategic use of data
How are you measuring the results of your events? Start from NPS, but don’t limit yourself to that. There’s plenty you can do to ensure your event-marketing strategy works constantly and as a whole. Not only data-driven approaches are being adopted by businesses, but they’re getting more personalized every day. It’s so far the best competitive market intelligence in use. And as every event is a business itself, customers and potential customers also need to have their behavior analyzed in order for the results to be learned and improved. For that, consider the history of your own business, as well as industry benchmarks. Your judgement and experience count, but you must have evidence to support and perfect your decision making.
Let us guide you on your event planning skills management:
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