The Ultimate Event Checklist:
Keep Your Events Running Smoothly

Honest talk. Two-thirds of event marketing teams cut their budgets last year. Succeeding today means keeping a tight hold on your budget and doing more with less.

If you don’t have a robust event budget, create one now. Here are some topline categories to get you started:

• Event platform/Venue
• Internal and external team
• Promotion and marketing
• Speaker fees
• Merchandise and gifts
• Catering or food vouchers
• Entertainment
• Engagement technologies like virtual photobooth and social walls

Catch our deep dive on the topic here. Or jump straight to our event cost calculator.

Theme verification

Events are always a gamble. Will your event tracks resonate? Will speakers engage your attendees? Will the audience mix and mingle? While there’s an element of chance, you can de-risk events by testing themes and ideas during your research phase.

How? Here are some quick testing strategies:

• Run small-scale events: Remember, events don’t have to be huge flagship conferences. Run small webinars or roundtables to verify content before scaling up.
• Preview content on social media: Test out event track or session topics using micro-content on social media. If there’s a strong reaction, you know it’s a good option.
• Recruit focus groups: Gather a few customers who match your ICP and bounce ideas off them. If their eyes glaze over, ditch the idea. But if they light up, add them to your event.

2. Event planning checklist (4 months out)

Goal setting

Events can have a ton of different objectives depending upon the business goals they need to solve. Here are a few examples of event goals.

• Discover event (e.g. thought leadership webinar): Brand awareness, new accounts acquired, social media reach, organic search impressions
• Engage event (e.g. annual conference): Accounts engaged, product adoption, users onboarded
• Growth event (e.g. customer showcase meetup): Pipeline created, referrals acquired, social media mentions, evangelists engaged

Goal-setting lays the foundation for your event planning checklist. Get granular and set nuanced event goals. (If you get that right, your events will achieve your business goals, and revenue will follow.)

Event type

Traditional event strategy is simple: hold one megaevent per-year and hope for the best. But that strategy’s broken. Modern event planning process (what we’re calling Event-led Growth) empowers marketers to turn monolithic events into complex, multi-touch journeys.

Marketers have dozens of event types to choose from, each one a little more suited to different goals, industries, and companies. Here are some of our favorites:

• Networking events: Bring your customers, prospects, and community together.
• Workshops: Help your attendees better themselves by teaching them new skills, tactics, or ideas.
• Internal events: Events aren’t only external. Use town halls to communicate with your whole company and team-building activities to bond teams.
• Conferences: Event-led growth still has flagship events. Make a splash with a large multi-track conference.

Event technology

Event tech is like your skeleton. It provides structure and supports all the experiences you want to run. But what separates a quality event management platform from a mediocre one? Here are the non-negotiable features we recommend for a modern platform:

• Registration and ticketing: Capture signups, monetize registrations, ticket sales, and more.
• Networking: Attendees want to talk to each other… so make sure you let them!
• Brand customization: Create a consistent customer experience by customizing your brand and color scheme.
• Engagement tools: Turn one-way presentations into engaging two-way interactions with chat boxes, Q&As, and polls.
• Multi-channel streaming: Blast your event to every corner of the world via Facebook, YouTube, and custom RTMP platforms.
• Event analytics: Make sense of the noise and measure your return on event.
• Marketing and sales integrations: Events are a force multiplier for marketing and sales. Integrate your event platform with tech stack to enrich, augment, and improve everything else.

Evaluate and select your event tech early in the planning process. There’s no point plowing through your event planning checklist only to find that your tech doesn’t support your plans. Struggling to find the right events platform? Check out our comprehensive virtual event platforms guide.

Venue (if your event is in-person)

In-person and hybrid events need a physical venue. Here are a few things to add to your event planning checklist:

• Location: Pick a venue that’s easy to get to. If you’re targeting a local area, focus on parking or public transit. For international events, find a venue near an airport or transport hub.
• Capacity: Half-filled venues feel impersonal and empty. Over-capacity locations feel cramped and claustrophobic. Find a venue that’s designed for your scale of event.
• Budget: Ask for prices early. There’s no point in researching a venue that you can’t afford. Make sure your quote includes all optional extras that you need.

Keynote and supporting speakers

Speakers can make or break an event. Start researching early and pitch speakers as soon as you know who you want. Good keynote speakers can book up months — or even years — in advance.

• Shortlisting and finalizing speakers for your event
• Travel and accomodation
• Technical requirements

Vendors and service providers

As an attendee, it’s easy to assume that an event organizer handles everything. But they don’t. Even the best event organizers bring in outside help. Ask a successful organizer for their event planner checklist and you’ll see just how much support they need.

Here are some of the most popular external vendors and service providers:

• Management: New event planners may want to bring in an experienced head to guide their event planning and execution. This is a good idea if you’re running a new event type for the first time.
• Technology: All events should have technologists on-hand to manage digital tech and AV equipment. Sometimes the venue will provide someone. Other times, it’s up to you to find them.
• Catering: Again, your venue might provide catering services. If it does, make sure you know who you’re working with. Otherwise, bring in outside caterers. 
• Location: You need to ensure that your event venue is comfortably accessible for your attendees.

Sponsorship needs

Most events have sponsors but for different reasons. Start by thinking about what help you need from potential sponsors. For example, do you need financial support? Or maybe you need a big name to boost your event marketing? Perhaps you need a technology partner?

Sponsors

Once you know what sort of sponsors you need, go and find them. Tap your and your colleagues’ professional networks. Loop in executives if you can. Sponsorship deals can take a while to work out, so run outreach as soon as possible.

Events team

With your plan starting to come together, you need a team to execute it. Although each team composition will be different, there are some core must-have roles.

• Technologist: Someone who knows your technology inside and out.
• Producer: Recruit an experienced event planner (or equip a newer employee with an awesome event planner checklist) and operator. They’re the person who manages the day-of execution and keeps everything running smoothly.
• AV operators: Don’t skimp on quality operators. Find professionals who know how to shoot and transmit events.
• Moderator: Most events have one or two moderators who oversee sessions and guide attendees through the event. It’s a good opportunity to showcase internal talent.
• Attendee relations: During your event, things will go wrong. That’s inevitable. Instead of worrying about whether you’ll encounter problems, recruit an attendee relationship team and prepare them to fight fires throughout the day.

After building your events team, your event planning checklist is complete. Next up, marketing.

4. Event promotion checklist (2 months out)

Positioning statement

Effective marketing relies on a strong foundation. Before diving into awareness and acquisition campaigns, spend time on your positioning statement and messaging guidelines.

If you’re new to positioning, start with a tried-and-tested positioning framework like this one:

For [target customer] Who [statement of need or opportunity], [product name] is a [event category] That [statement of key benefit]. Unlike [competing alternative], [product name] [statement of primary differentiation].

When you complete it, your statement will look something like this:

For [entry-level sales reps] Who [are struggling to generate meetings and pipeline], [SDR Superstars] is a [sales IC workshop] That [teaches SDRs proven prospecting skills]. Unlike [other sales events], [SDR Superstars] [targets underperforming entry-level employees and delivers real, actionable training].

Your positioning statement is your foundation. Every marketing effort builds from it — as you’ll see later in the event promotion checklist.

Event schedule

When you’ve confirmed your tracks, speakers, and sessions, piece together your run of show (also called a shoe flow, cue sheet, or cue-to-cue). This becomes your single source of truth — the definitive account of what happens and when.

Event website or landing page

Create an HQ for your event with a dedicated event website or landing page. It gives you somewhere to share information, save details, and convert visitors into attendees.

Here’s an example landing page for a hackathon: