We recently held the Entrepreneurs and Innovators award with
WAtoday. Having done some work on this event it was exciting to see some of the
work you completed finally at the event.
This event was however and eye opener as to how stressful a
life in Event management can be.
As the event whilst looked like it ran
smoothing was cracking at the seams.
In a week leading up to the event we had one of our main
speakers realise that they have double booked that date and where unable to attend
the event, however we were lucky in the fact that she was able to provide a suitable
replacement for the day who was more then suitable.
So everything was running smoothly from there until it was
the day before the event and another one of our speakers from the panel was
rushed to emergency so it was then having to cover this speaker quickly before
this event which was able to be done. This also meant that all the imagery and
promotion on the website needed to be changed.
Another topic that both the Event managers from NetworkingWA
were worried about was the face that this was the first time that they had used
this location and this was the first time that they had had an experience with
this MC. They ran into the problem that the location hadn't made the stage
large enough so all the banners and presenting of the awards had to be done on
the floor and not everyone in the room was able to see the recipients when they
received the awards and it looked like a mess.
Another problem was the timing the event had been timed to a
tee and all those in the need to know knew about the timing however this didn’t
mean that they followed it. As the MC starting the event to early which meant
that when people were eating their breakfast that one of the guest speakers was
have to battle with the sound of clinking knifes and forks. However if the
schedule had been followed there was an allowance of 15 minuets before the
speaker was due to speak allowing him and everyone else to eat their breakfast.
It was a great experience to attend this as my first event
and even though it may not have run as smoothly as they had planned, it was
good to see that sometimes you need to think on your feet and work around an
event and then forget that it happened.
2 comments:
Wow, that must have such an interesting experience, Sian. It just goes to show that no matter how much you organise an event, so many things can still go wrong at the last minute. It sounded like you were all on top of it and were able to recover quickly, which is great to hear. Its really nice to see the final product when you work so hard on an event of piece of work. I know in my internship when one of my reports were published it was such a great feeling and all the work that went into it felt worth it and i felt like i was on my way.
Starting out as an intern can feel a bit disarming but the more you do, the more it pays off.
Hi Sian,
Thanks for this insight into WAToday event, I definitely relate to your ‘cracking at the seams’ statement. I had a similar experience at my placement at GO Communications. At an event we hosted I too had my first taste of the stress and adrenaline event management brings – it’s certainly harder than it looks! Did you have another chance to attend an event during your internship? If so, did that run more smoothly?
Molly
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