Posted on June 6, 2024
Event planning is an involved process that takes work to get right—event planners of all manners could tell you that. What not everyone knows, however, is how to go from planning a decent event, to creating brilliant and memorable experiences.
SWOT analysis for event planning is your gateway to top-tier successful events.
We’re going to cover all the basics of SWOT analysis, then dive into the best practice you need to follow to guarantee success. First, of course, we’ll take you through a definition of the main topic.
What is SWOT analysis?
SWOT is an acronym, standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Analyzing your events using this model lets you develop a keen understanding of how to optimize the event planning process, based on both your performance and that of your events themselves.
As per the acronym, a SWOT analysis is split into four parts. This makes it easier to digest each one, as well as simplifying the process of identifying highlights and areas for improvement. Also, with SWOT analysis, it’s easier to develop a balanced perspective on your events, regardless of your personal feelings on how they went.
Since the approach itself is quite flexible and adjustable, SWOT analysis for event planning can be used for hybrid events, virtual events, and in-person events alike. This makes it useful for all types of analysis for event planning.
Why is SWOT analysis useful?
If you’re in the event planning business, you know that there’s not enough time in the day for every idea you might have. That means you need to know you’re spending your time well and that the tasks and approaches you prioritize have to be worth it.
We’re going to show you why SWOT analysis for event planning deserves a space in your busy schedule.
Understanding what went right
When trying to optimize the event experience, it can be easy to focus on the negatives. What didn’t go the way you’d hoped, and how can you change that next time? What were you not satisfied with?
While this is useful to know, it’s also important to identify your strengths. That’s because knowing what did go well helps you make sure it keeps happening. Plus, it’s encouraging to recognize your own high points and accomplishments, which improves morale and helps you perform even better next time.
Whether your event attendance was better than expected, or your attendees were really impressed with the business SMS messaging protocols you followed to get information out to them, SWOT analysis makes a point of identifying and understanding exactly what went well.
Learning from what went wrong
Conversely, SWOT also helps you understand and, crucially, learn from any mistakes.
Invitations might have been formatted poorly, for example. This could lead to various problems, such as low attendance or frustrated attendees. SWOT analysis helps you identify the root cause of problems and address those going forward.
It’s crucial to note that SWOT analysis for event planning doesn’t make failure the exclusive focus. Instead, it only takes up 25% of the analysis, so you’re free to focus on other things the rest of the time. This makes it less intimidating to think about what could be improved, and avoids making the analysis process discouraging.
Planning for the future
Event planners who want to stay ahead of the game need to be prepared for anything, which means they have to learn from the past to get ready for the future. Only then can they take advantage of any potential opportunities that come their way.
Incorporating master scheduler software into your toolkit can offer a significant advantage, providing a comprehensive view of all event-related activities and enabling efficient scheduling that adapts to changes dynamically.
SWOT analysis helps with future preparedness by encouraging event planners to critically examine their work. Whether it’s B2B lead generation ideas or past events, with SWOT analysis, you’ll consider the advantages and risks of everything, so you can flexibly respond to new situations as they arise.
In addition to traditional event elements, embracing modern trends like live streaming can significantly extend your event’s reach and engagement. This method allows remote attendance, catering to a global audience and ensuring that even those who cannot physically attend can participate in real-time
Remaining competitive
SWOT analysis helps you identify ways to grow, which in turn makes it easier to keep up with the competition.
Whether you’re working on outdoing your direct competition by becoming better than them at what they do, or you’re trying to win in the broader competition for sponsorships, SWOT analysis can help you. It simplifies the process of professional self-development, which lets you increase productivity and simultaneously address your mistakes.
Incidentally, that also lets you turn yourself into strong competition for anyone else in your sector. And the more often and well you perform your SWOT analyses, the better you’ll become at managing and outperforming even the most intense competition.
Top tips for perfecting your SWOT analysis
Next, we’ll be sharing some of the best tips you can use to ensure your SWOT analysis for event planning is successful. This, in turn, will help you become much better at event planning, even if you’re already a highly skilled professional.
The following tips are presented in no particular order.
1. Closely consider your resources
Whether you have plentiful or limited resources, it’s important to take stock of them before you begin your SWOT analysis so that you can practice efficient resource allocation.
For example, if your company has a robust B2B sales strategy framework, you can take advantage of this by conducting a quick SWOT analysis of that framework. This will let you learn what kinds of approaches work within the sales team, which you can take lessons from in your own event planning work.
There’s no need to limit yourself to in-house resources, either. If you have access to external ones, such as knowledgeable experts who can enrich your understanding of different event planning strategies, it’s well worth including their expertise in your SWOT analysis.
2. Consider the market context
Events are a market just as much as retail is. This means your event planning is also susceptible to influence from market trends and is, in turn, influenced by the current market situation at any given point.
For example, let’s consider the luxury events market. If you’re organizing events within these kinds of niche markets, you’d likely be using event influencer marketing, as the two go hand in hand. You’d struggle to keep up with such a competitive market if you skipped out on or didn’t know about this important trend.
That’s why you need to include the market and competitive context in your SWOT analysis for event planning.
3. Keep a broad scope
We’ve already mentioned that external factors like the state of the events market impact your event planning. However, beyond marketing and economic factors, there are also many internal factors to take into consideration.
To ensure you never miss a crucial factor, it’s a good idea to analyze lots of information by adopting a broad scope.
Key factors to include in your analysis might include your top competitors, your past event performance, the reception your recent event received, and much more.
4. Use the right tools
You wouldn’t start an audit of your company’s finances without the appropriate audit management software, as this valuable tool saves you both time and effort. In the same way, you need to use the most effective tools if you want to conduct the best possible SWOT analysis.
What counts as an essential tool, or even a helpful tool, depends on your personal priorities. If you’re mostly concerned with digitizing your notes so you can easily search through them, for example, you’d likely get the most out of a powerful tool that can scan and digitize handwriting.
Broadly speaking, a strategic planning tool will always help. That’s because SWOT analysis for event planning relies on strategic planning in the same way that organizing events does.
In addition to strategic planning tools, utilizing customizable proposal templates can streamline the documentation process, allowing you to quickly generate tailored event proposals that meet client expectations and align with your SWOT findings.
In selecting tools for SWOT analysis in event planning, consider innovations like Orchestra, a software used for educational scheduling. Its automation and intuitive design, such as drag-and-drop interfaces, show how similar technologies can streamline event planning.
5. Check in with your clients
Being a successful event planner relies, at least in part, on being able to maintain strong relationships with clients. That means including them in your SWOT analyses so that you can learn as much as possible about each one.
It can be tempting to say you know all about your client’s preferences, especially if you’ve been working with the client in question for some time. However, there’s always a chance you’ll be surprised by what corporate clients really think when you ask them directly.
Plus, if there’s a discrepancy between what you think your clients want and what they really want, you can analyze where the gap came from. This helps you prevent it from recurring.
6. Try something new
Event planning relies on innovation. From brand-new event check-in software, to the latest in invitation design, there’s always something new on the horizon that you can incorporate into your own planning protocols.
And with SWOT analysis for event planning on your side, you can pick out the new elements that do and do not work for you. This helps you secure continuous growth in a sustainable way.
7. Think about your communications
The ways in which you interact with both your event stakeholders and attendees is absolutely crucial to the success of your events, which is why it’s vital to pay special attention to your communication strategies as you’re conducting a SWOT analysis.
For example, you might consider whether your choices of communication channels are conducive to effective communication. If they are, you can start using them in more communication contexts; if not, you need to know why so you can adapt.
In your analysis, be sure to focus on your personal priorities. If you feel your internal communication style is already sufficiently successful, it’s worth considering why, but your focus should probably be on your external communications, for example.
8. Take careful notes
In order to perform a SWOT analysis for event planning, you need to have a lot of information on your events, how they went, and how you planned them. This includes noting down the bad times you had during planning, as well as the good, in order to create a complete picture.
Gathering all of that information becomes a whole lot easier when you’re taking well-written notes from the beginning.
Let’s say you’re hosting an event that discusses how to build a go to market strategy. You’d want to start by noting down when you began the planning phase, and then detail every step of that phase one by one.
It’s better to have too many notes than to try and make up for notes that are missing.
9. Look at previous event notes
In a similar vein, it’s important to know as much as you can about past events, potentially including ones you yourself didn’t plan or run.
If you can figure out what the main threats were to a past event your company hosted, for example, it will help you prepare for if or when you encounter the same threats going forward.
That means you can learn more without having to repeat mistakes, which lets you design mindful spaces more effectively in less time.
Previous event notes can also give you insight into the ways in which your planning style differs from those of other people, or how it’s changed over time if you ran the past events.
10. Don’t rush
You can’t put together a brilliant business plan overnight. If you try, you’ll find yourself cutting corners and focusing on the limited time you have to complete the project instead of on the plan and the goals it’s meant to accomplish.
The exact same principle applies here.
Great SWOT analyses are in-depth, which means they take time to craft. Plus, there’s the matter of improving your analysis expertise over time, meaning you’ll get better at SWOT analyses the longer you spend conducting them.
So, be sure you practice careful time management. This will help you get the best possible results, even if it means taking more time to complete your analysis the first time (or two). After all, effective time management doesn’t mean doing things fast—it means carefully prioritizing tasks and allocating the right amount of time to each one so you optimize your schedule.
Final thoughts
It’s crucial to understand everything about your event planning process, from strengths to weaknesses and much more. Only by developing this in-depth understanding can you work to keep getting better.That’s why SWOT analysis for event planning is a fantastic approach.
It’s encouraging, it helps you take a holistic approach to successful event planning, and it’s based on simple yet robust principles. In a word, SWOT analysis is accessible.
So, the next time you want to plan a successful event, consider doing a close SWOT analysis of a few past events you’ve organized. This helps you troubleshoot any problems and optimize the event experience for both you and your attendees, as well as any key stakeholders.
About the Author / Ana Almeida
