I’m at Eventing the Future 2007 in Auckland – the conference run by the New Zealand Association of Event Professionals. Some interesting sessions on day one. Learnings include:

• there’s no recipe to making money from events management
• quality content can be repurposed across a range of marketing channels to get valuable media exposure – content is king
• strategic planning is essential to ensuring the successful growth and development of your event
• research into ticket buying shows that word of mouth is (still) the top way that people find out about events.

Making money

Ably facilitated by Peter Cox from SPARC, a panel discussion of representatives from events management companies kindly shared their business acumen. We heard that:

• The secret to successful business partnerships is working with like-minded people.
• It’s hard to grow a business – to take that step of employing staff to deliver events so you can focus on the business development side.
• Money can be made from events that are low cost to run but that have a high perceived value (so you can charge a good rate).
• Big events are not necessarily the most profitable – small events can become more ‘stable’ (in terms of sponsorship and supplier relationships, for example) a lot easier.
• Recurring events allow you to get efficient systems in place, but it’s not just a matter of the same event, different dates – a recurring event needs ‘new fizz’ every time.
• Developing strong brands is very important – sponsors will want to be associated with the story behind the event.

Central and local government came in for some criticism from delegates for withdrawing financial support from events once they become successful (while often, it was acknowledged, continuing to provide infrastructure, advice and resource consent support). Panelists agreed that one successful year is no guarantee of a successful future, and events require continued development. Peter summed up by arguing for greater conversation between government and events managers to build understanding - on the one hand, funding from government is needed beyond a start up year and, on the other, events managers need to do the planning required for government to make a two-to-three year investment.

Quality content

Scott Smythe (Senior Vice President, Sponsorship and Event Marketing) from Visa International shared his perspective on what sponsors are looking for in events. He said sponsors want more engagement in the property and more creative control. To make your event more attractive to sponsors, he recommended building exclusive, customisable programmes for sponsors to leverage and offering a range of unique marketing assets (online, in-stadium, content and media).

Scott emphasised the importance of gaining media exposure through the placement of creative content. Visa uses branded content that has ‘social currency’ – content that will be picked up by fans and debated with others in the community. An example is Visa’s Rugby World Cup debate: every week, a video feed is added to Visa’s website that shows a selection of rugby legends debating an issue, and community members can contribute their opinions. The media has picked up the content and published it in print channels, too. He cautioned that the content needs to be good enough or viewers will reject it. He advised that blogs, downloads and social networking sites, while possibly over-hyped, are here to stay and need to be part of the marketing mix.    

Strategic planning

Tracey Hull from THA Consulting in Melbourne ran through four case studies of how strategic planning had assisted the committees and boards running events, including simply getting agreement across the team about the objectives of an event, managing growth, and using the strategic plan to provide a framework for making decisions about how to stage an event. She advised delegates to apply project management principles to running events and referred us to the event project management systems website.

Ticket buying

Finally, Karen Smith from the Tourism Management department at Victoria University presented some findings from research into how event attendees find out about and purchase tickets for events. The most important information sources about events for consumers in her study were previous experience of the event and word of mouth. Consumers mainly bought events tickets via the primary ticket agent and preferred to purchase in person. Karen stressed that events managers need to design a distribution strategy that uses multiple channels for ticket distribution. Papers on distribution channels and the information mix for events are available by emailing Karen.

I’ll post more tomorrow …

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