How to develop a strategic plan for your event
What is the purpose of strategic planning?
Planning for the next few years of your event in an overview sense helps your event in many ways:
It brings the team together to agree on and work towards one collective goal, and provides a roadmap on how to achieve that vision which provides focus.
It helps you identify what you are trying to achieve and figure out how you will achieve it. For example, some event committees are trying to support their town such as by attracting visitors to spend money at local businesses and providing an opportunity for community groups to fundraise.
It helps you figure out how you will overcome your biggest challenges.
It helps you secure grant funding and sponsor partnerships because funders and sponsors can see what the event is trying to achieve and how it will do so.
It helps you plan how you will keep your event fresh and unique for attendees as time passes.
It provides a reference to help with decision making.
It helps you realise when you have achieved success (as you define it) so you can celebrate it with your team and community!
How is strategic planning for events done?
What sets you apart from other events?
Start by developing a SWOT analysis of your event. This is a brainstorming of four lists: your event’s internal Strengths (what gives you an advantage over competitors) and Weaknesses (what disadvantages you compared with your competitors), the Opportunities that are available in the environment outside of your event (e.g. in your town or state), and external Threats that might impact your event (such as economic recession).
This quick exercise will help you identify the issues you face and figure out how to effectively overcome them, as well as the opportunities available to leverage, and how to do so.
Strengths
These might include
Skills and knowledge in your team; good leadership; strong engagement tactics that keep your volunteers engaged
Strong financial footing and diverse revenue streams
A good reputation and unique elements of your program
A great location close to where your ideal attendees live
What makes you special and different, and how you improve the lives of your attendees and stakeholders
Weaknesses
These might include
Anything you are lacking such as financial or human resources (such as volunteers to help with event planning) or certain skills
Anything that noticeably needs improvement in your event
Anything you could be more competitive in
Opportunities
Opportunities are things external to your event and out of your control that could support your growth or success, such as
An effective destination marketing organisation
Local community groups who want to fundraise via your event
Trends in events that you can leverage
Technology that you can use to reduce your workload or make buying tickets quick and easy, such as e-ticketing and stallholder management systems
Your attendee’s ‘customer journey’ - all the points along the path of how they hear about your event, consider attending, buy tickets, plan travel, attend, and talk about your event on social media
Threats
Threats are things external to your event and out of your control that could limit your growth or success, such as
Pandemics and natural disasters (!) and economics (e.g. recession)
Changing customer trends - do people still want to experience what your event offers?
Competition from other new or changing events
An example of an ideal attendee profile from a sporting event (the event also has profiles for competitors and another type of spectator)
Who are your ideal attendees?
Knowing as much as possible about who you are trying to attact will help you with your decision making, such as what to include in the program, what kind of marketing tactics to use, the kinds of businesses to approach for sponsorship (ones that share the same target markets), and so on.
Who do you want to come to your event? Not everyone is ideal for your event – don’t try to be something for everyone, but focus on giving a fantastic experience to one group of people
Demographic – What kinds of people, such as adult couples in a certain age range, or families with younger or older children?
Geographic – Where do they live?
Psychographic – What are their interests? What are their needs and wants if they are holidaying?
You might have a couple of target markets such as local families with primary school aged children and their visiting friends and relatives, and families from within a two-hour drive of your town.
Who are your benchmarks?
Which events do you look up to as a benchmark of success?
Which event’s level of success do you aim to emulate? Remember, you get to define what success means to you, such as bringing the community together, fundraising by community groups, attracting visitors whose average expenditure per person is high, delivering a really exciting and unique event, ensuring attendees have a fantastic experience, and so on.
What are your event’s identity and themes?
What are your event’s themes? Here are the themes of the Alice Springs Rotary Henry on Todd Regatta:
What is your vision for your event?
Where do you want your event to be in 3-5 years time?
What are you striving to achieve?
Articulate this in one visionary sentence. Now everyone involved with your event knows where it is going.
The Henley-on-Todd Regatta put their vision in this way:
The Rotary Henley-on-Todd Regatta is an iconic, quirky and fun destination event that raises significant funds for Alice Springs Rotary charities and drives visitation to Alice Springs.
What are your priorities to work on?
How will you achieve your vision?
What are the key priorities to work on that will help achieve that?
What are your goals?
Set SMART goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound (meaning you state when you will achieve them by).
As an example, if your vision includes to support your town economically, a priority might be to attract interstate overnight visitors (as overnight visitors spend more than daytrip visitors).
Your SMART goal might then be to attract 250 interstate overnight visitors to this year’s event, and then attract 500 per year starting from the following year.
How will you know if you have achieved that goal?
For each goal you need to identify the way you will measure achievement, such as via a certain question in your attendee survey. (In this case, it might be combination of questions, such as questions about where attendees live, how many nights they will stay in your town, approximately how much will they spend in your town on this trip, and was the festival the main reason for their visit to your town).
Your action plan
Lastly, now that you know what specific goals you are trying to achieve, outline how you will work to achieve those - what steps will be taken, who will take those steps (and who will help them), when those steps will be taken, what budget will be required and where it will come from, and any other resources that will be required - this can be done in a table or spreadsheet.
When it comes to attracting overnight visitors, this might be a programming tactic such as adding an appealing headline act, or running a participatory sports competition that athletes in that sport would travel to attend, or marketing tactics such as digital advertising where ideal attendees live, or working with an influencer that your ideal attendees follow.
A strategic plan is a living document and should be referred to regularly, and it should also be updated and tweaked as necessary as time passes.
A case study of developing a strategic plan
The Alice Springs Rotary Henley-on-Todd Regatta is a zany annual dry riverbed boating regatta in the middle of the Australian desert.
Volunteers
A major challenge for Henley-on-Todd’s long-term viability is the diminishing numbers of Rotary Club members to help plan and deliver the Regatta, as well as the major commitment required of a number of the volunteers. The first stage of their five-year strategic plan was to establish more efficient planning practices to free up volunteer capacity.
Interstate visitors
The team had a goal to boost economic impact by attracting interstate visitors. Once they identified how they would try to achieve this, they were able to increase attendance by over 4%, with 62% of attendee from interstate (44%) or overseas (18%). This represented an overachievement of the SMART goal they set for themselves of a 2.5% increase. In addition to marketing tactics, online ticket sales were introduced to increase attendance as well as speed up entry and support cash flow. Achieving this goal helped them inspire the Territory government to provide them with more funding.
Revenue
Henley-on-Todd enjoyed an 8.5% increase on the previous year’s revenue, another goal they overachieved. A portion of the profits were set aside into a fund for reinvestment into the event, something that had not been done in recent years.
Audience participation
As the program of Henley on Todd is comprised entirely of participatory races, it is vital that attendees join in the fun – if not, there is no event! In the first year after writing a strategic plan, 11% of attendees participated in the races, a 15% increase over the year before. This was the result of innovative new activities to increase local participation, such as a competition for local gyms, a corporate challenge, and the addition of more children’s events.
Attendee satisfaction
For the first time the visitor survey included questions on customer satisfaction; 98% of attendees were either very satisfied (66%) or satisfied (26%) with the event.
We used our strategic business plan to apply for and win very significant funding from a multi-year grant.
The plan identified the key things the event needed to work on, and the budget required for each, and when we applied for funding, we received about 90% of what we needed for the first three years of the plan.
The plan has given us clear direction. Now all of us on the committee know what we are doing and how to go about it.
This year was all about rebranding as a base to move the event forward. We have added a new event the night before the Regatta, and expanded the event site for a quiet space for kids activities and to eat at tables.
Now we’ll focus on the next thing.
— Dale McIver, Event Coordinator
The activities undertaken to bolster Henley-on-Todd’s revenue streams and address operational challenges will ensure the Festival’s long-term viability and economic and tourism benefits for the community.
Over to you
Set up a time to have a strategy planning session with your team. Make this fun, and be sure to include visitor feedback from recent years.
Write up a strategic plan for your event based on the structure of this blog article, and share it with your volunteers and stakeholders – everyone should know what you are trying to achieve.
Remember to review your plan each year when you start your event planning cycle.
Our strategic plan template can help you save time
Our strategic planning Master Class can walk you through the process (when you purchase this one-hour on-demand webinar you receive a free strategic plan template)