Intro to Event Planning & Management (with Google Sheets)

at first glance you might think an apple keynote is a very different event compared to say my last birthday party yes wwdc might be on a slightly higher budget but there are many similarities as well both events have attendees who in turn have to go through some sort of registration or invitation process my party's a bit more exclusive by the way they both have a set agenda both have some sort of promotional materials to let people know about the event and those materials need to be distributed through various channels and of course it doesn't hurt to have a charismatic good looking and very tastefully dressed host alright jokes aside although the scale of those two events are extremely different the cool thing about event management is that the structure you use and the process you follow more or less stays the same let's get started hi friends welcome back to channel if you're new here my name is jeff i'm a product marketing manager at

a large technology company and in the past five years i've planned and executed hundreds of offline and online events these events include both small-scale c-level round tables that take place in a single afternoon and a thousand people webinar series that go on for several months now event management is an extremely broad topic that cannot be covered in a single youtube video so i created a free event management 101 course over at skillshare and included some of the key highlights in this video as well basically i walk you through step by step the entire event planning process on google sheets share how i structure the spreadsheet for cross-team collaboration and talk about the purpose of each tab to be completely transparent if you just want

to be a bit less amateur when it comes to planning the next happy hour or team offsite the concepts i'll go through in this video is more than enough if you're a professional who comes into regular contact with events at work or even an aspiring marketer then i highly recommend you go through that course because that's what i wish i could have had when i joined the marketing team without further ado let's dive in

right off the bat you'll notice i've split this uh google sheets into six different sections overview key information uh pre-event uh during event post events and raw data using these empty tabs and section headers and these are all color coded as well right and do this for two reasons number one you're going to receive a lot of questions about the event from different stakeholders and you need to find that information as quickly as possible and number two because there's so many teams involved in event planning you want the spreadsheet to be as self-explanatory as possible the idea of the overview tab is very simple imagine someone with zero background of the event comes across the spreadsheet after they look through the information on this tab they should have a general understanding of what the event is about without having to ask you directly key information tabs include rsvp snapshot agenda promotion channels and comms timeline and the way to think about these four tabs is also very simple just imagine if someone very senior like your manager or another team's director message you about the event what would they be asking about 99 of the time the answer can be found in one of these four tabs they might ask about how many people have signed up so far rsvp snapshot uh how the content is coming along agenda tab which promotion channel is driving the most signups promo channels and when we're sending the next confirmation or reminder email out comes timeline for us the project managers every single one of these tabs within the spreadsheet is important right but trust me want to tell you very few senior managers will care about all the specific details and will only want like the high level information that you have so thoughtfully already consolidated in the key information section here pre-event tabs uh this is where the pre-during and post method comes in uh broadly speaking this part just helps you organize all the things you need to plan before the event actually uh takes place hence pre-event during event tabs list out the things you need to take care of during the event and you guessed it post here means post office no post event tabs help you organize the things you need to do after the event is complete quick note these yellow purple and green tabs are by no means an exhaustive list of tabs you need for each like section but this provides a very good start and as long as you think about it in this way like before during and after the event we decrease the chances of missing something important raw data tabs this is exactly like it sounds this is where you keep all the raw data you collect throughout the event planning and execution process like registration data attendee data engagement data post event survey data they're all kept here and i like to mark these in gray over the next few lessons i'm going to deep dive into each one of these tabs and explain that tab's purpose uh go over the formatting and formulas within and make adjustments based on real life situations okay let's dive alright and we're back i hope you

enjoyed that snippet of the event management 101 course there are total of 11 lessons over at skillshare and it covers the exact structure i use when i plan and manage events at work as a product marketing manager if that was at all interesting you can use a link down below to sign up to a two-month free trial of skillshare they're not sponsoring this video by the way also down below is the exact event management template i go through so you can make a copy of that as well it might be slightly confusing without the accompanying explanations and the real-time adjustments i make within the course but i didn't want to hold back any resources from you guys because i'm an angel remember anyways let me know down in the comments what you think see you on the next video and in the meantime have a great one