Setting Up Your First Event Or Exhibition: Three Tips For Planning

Setting up your first event or exhibition is an exciting prospect, no matter what reason you’ve set out on this project. It’s a time to showcase something truly special and have others collectively gain new insights and novel experiences. 

That said, it’s going to be a lot of work. Proper organisation is key, and you’ll need to plan things well in advance if you hope to pull it off. Even smaller events require a lot of work, and there will always be more to do than you think. 

To help you get started, here are three tips to set you up for success.

Have Clearly Defined Goals

The very first thing you need to focus on when planning an event or exhibition is what sort of goals you’d like to achieve. These are the anchor points for the entire thing, so you’ll need to spend plenty of time on this stage to set a precedent. 

Your goals will likely be very different from those of the next person, but try to link them to values. For example, if you’re putting on an event to educate, why? And what problem are you trying to resolve? If you’re setting up an art exhibition, what’s the overall theme? And what do you want people to take away from it? 

Once you’ve asked yourself a few of these sorts of questions, you can write down some core goals and start to build a strategy to achieve them. It doesn’t have to be perfect – the important thing is that everything is clearly defined (it will evolve later). 

2. Budget Carefully

With a lot of different things to do, there’s also likely to be many different things to pay for, so carefully planning out a budget is a key early step. 

Make sure you consider all elements, such as safety, insurance, staffing, promotion, power, and more. It’ll take you a while to work through, but take things one step at a time, and you’ll get there. 

Also, be sure to keep back roughly 15% for unexpected expenses, as you can’t expect everything to go perfectly to plan. 

3. Spend Plenty of Time on Logistics

The logistical hurdles many face when setting up an event or exhibition often represent the most challenging part of all. 

There’s a lot to consider here, and you’ll likely need to call upon several different services to help you out. A general event planner can help a great deal – it’s good to have a collaborator with a project like this. You’ll also want to get in contact with audio visual services, catering companies, and so on, and if you need to move anything heavy, you’ll either need fork lift hire or a freight and haulage company. 

Wrapping Up

You should now feel a little clearer about planning your event or exhibition. The above points by no means cover everything, but they’re a start. Don’t bite off more than you can chew and lean on the professionals around you, and you’ll do great. Good luck!