Event Planning - The 4 tools I couldn't do without

Anybody close to me will know that most of my time recently has been dedicated to planning two significant events in the coming weeks in London and Austin, TX. I decided to put my head above water, briefly, to share the key tools that help me bring these events to fruition.

1. Evernote

There are many great apps out there for taking notes, I’ve settled on Evernote, and I’m unlikely to change. Between meeting notes, small to-do lists and white board photos, I create around 20 notes per week per event. My current count of notes per project is around 380 notes, so the ability to include tags and to search your notes, really helps when you want to quickly remember when and how decisions were made during meetings.

2. Central Desktop

This is where EVERYTHING for my projects is run. I use the document hosting facility for master attendee lists, agenda’s, presenter content, and many other items. The collaborative ability makes version control between different team members much easier.

I also use this for all project tasks and milestones, so essentially my full project plan is run through this. That means that I have Central Desktop open every day. Each project has approx. 250 tasks, you don’t want to get too granular with tasks, as then you get caught managing the system rather than actually doing the tasks.

3. iMeet

Meetings and Communications are the cornerstone of successfully delivering these events. For each event there are weekly project team meetings, sub team meetings, agency meetings, content meetings, and many more. If you add up the total minutes for all members who join my iMeet room each week, this is roughly 3,000 minutes per week per project.

iMeet is very flexible with both screen share and a file library. And the beauty for me is that it integrates with Evernote, so I can always call up previous notes within my meeting.

4. Adobe Design Suite

I’m not a designer, and on these two events I’m lucky to have access to an excellent Art Director, and an outsourced Design Specialist. However I believe it is important that any Marketer has some basic design skills.

For me, this means that when the professionals create quality work, you can access their templates and be able to use/tweak them for many different areas. For example when presenters and content owners want to bring event branding into their presentations, it needs to be customised for each person. Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator are enough to get me by, and you don’t need to spend a long time on training.

If you have any major events coming up, I’d recommend looking into these tools. I’m going to bury my head again until after the events are over, so will hopefully see sunlight sometime around mid-September!

Brian