Event strategists always start with the end in mind. They know the core principle in strategic planning is that all actions and decisions must support the event goal. When it comes to choosing speakers, it can be easy to get distracted by celebrity status or choose topics that may be personally interesting but not right for your target audience. Engaging the professional skills of a speaker’s bureau allows you to add an expert to your team at no cost to you, saves time and will potentially introduce you to people and topics you may not have otherwise found.

Bringing new tech to your event is easy; you just go to the event tech store, pick out what you want, take it home, unwrap it and press the big green "on" button.

If only.

Clearly there's more to it, and there are more opportunities for things to go awry, mistakes to be made, and issues to occur.

We've put our heads together and came up with eight "dos" and "don'ts" for implementing event technology at your events. If you're ever had a problem with tech at your events, there's a good chance you made one of the mistakes we're going to address below. 

Having just reviewed my numerous hotel and airline accounts, I was reminded of how much I traveled in 2017. Most of my trips were visiting and training clients, helping conduct booth sales or attending industry shows.

Event professionals spend a great deal of time on the road to prepare for and attend their events. Over the years, I have developed a few ways to cope with life on the road. Hope these tips help you in 2018 and beyond!

Staying Organized

Each year companies spend valuable resources on meetings and events – not because they are a nice add on, but because they are a proven, successful business tool.  A well planned, well executed event can invigorate a corporation and dazzle attendees.  But just because something didn’t go wrong, it doesn’t mean everything went right.  As event planners we need to stop accepting "no catastrophic failures" as a measure of success.

These seven points of focus can help ensure you produce a successful event each and every time.

Over the last few years, technology has become an integral part of the events industry. Anyone working in this dynamic area knows how painful it would be to juggle all the aspects of event management without the help of technology tools.

The demands placed in front of today’s organizers? To execute the logistics of the event perfectly, while at the same time providing engaging experiences that are tailor-made for attendees, satisfying different needs they may have before, during, and after the event.

Whether it’s making a list and checking it twice or end-of-year recaps and wrap-ups, winter is the season of lists. At Derse, much like when it comes to events, we’re all about preparation. So, we’ve scoured the internet for opinions and predictions on event marketing trends for the coming year.

These predictions from Chief Marketer, Entrepreneur, Forbes and more, combined with our knowledge from the past year and our expertise in aiding companies with events, exhibits and experiences led to our own list.

Quite often event organizers struggle with tight budgets and see getting an event app as a luxury they cannot afford. “This year we can’t make it, our budget has been approved and closed” or “We don’t have the budget for it this year” or “Maybe next year.”

Any of those sound familiar? If you’re an event organizer, you probably have said those things more than once in your life and indeed those are perfectly understandable statements. However, in this post, we’ll try to present this issue from a bit of a different perspective.

All event strategists know that content is king, so when we bring in outside speakers we need to do our homework and recommend wisely. As is the case with all things event strategists do, their actions yield the highest quality results that align with the event’s goal. In this instance, that means reaching out to an accredited speakers bureau and leveraging their expertise.

Whether you’re a fan or not, it’s hard to miss the hype around the biggest football championship of the year. And this year’s coverage has been particularly interesting with a spotlight on first-time host, Minneapolis. Unlike previous metropolises like Houston and San Francisco, Minneapolis/St. Paul had some hurdles, including fewer traditional event space options and frosty conditions. But the Twin Cities capitalized on its “Bold North” strengths to become the ultimate Super Bowl hub with a wide lineup of memorable experiences in and outside the big game.

Event organizers know that balancing tech trends with the realities of business and budgets is a challenge.

Roll something out too early, or to an audience that doesn’t fit, and it can easily fail. Hold back on new tech and your event can feel dated.

So how do you make sense of “bots” and voice-activated technology like Amazon Alexa? Well, the first place to start is understanding the difference between a new trend and a new technology.