{"id":4142,"date":"2016-01-20T23:59:30","date_gmt":"2016-01-21T04:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/?p=4142"},"modified":"2016-01-20T23:59:30","modified_gmt":"2016-01-21T04:59:30","slug":"little-book-of-event-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wrote-about\/little-book-of-event-planning\/","title":{"rendered":"Little Book of Event Planning"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve spent the last two years running WebEx events for the US Department of Labor. I learned in a trial by fire with large, national events being normal. I worked with the Secretary of Labor, the various Deputy Secretaries and I assisted with software rollouts, policy changes and training initiatives.<\/p>\n

I ran meetings for small groups of high-level officials and large sessions with hundreds of members of the public attending from all across the US. I facilitated some international VOIP calls putting people in as many as four countries together virtually.<\/p>\n

In that time, I’ve learned some rules of event planning. They served me well and in my time running events, I can count on one hand the number of failed events I had. And in all of those situations, one or many of the things we planned for went wrong.<\/p>\n

There are some issues you can recover from and others there is no coming back from. Sometimes an issue can be as unforeseen but fairly minor as a speaker putting the clicker to advance the slides in a pocket which caused the slides to jump sporadically around in front of a packed Auditorium.<\/p>\n

There are other, bigger issues such as a phone line dropping mid-presentation or a computer rebooting due to a crash or software installation. The world of event planning and tech support mean never assuming you have everything under control.<\/p>\n

I have 10 Rules for Event Planning Success<\/h3>\n
    \n
  1. Expect the unexpected. (And have a backup plan.)<\/li>\n
  2. Test. Retest. Re-retest everything. <\/li>\n
  3. Be ready to fail. (You will. It is inevitable.)<\/li>\n
  4. Know your trump cards (who can push meeting or take scheduled space.)<\/li>\n
  5. Write things down. (You think you can remember everything. Right up until you can’t.)<\/li>\n
  6. Organize yourself. (Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.)<\/li>\n
  7. Be flexible. (Things will change. Usually on short notice.)<\/li>\n
  8. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. (You will be wrong. You will make mistakes.) <\/li>\n
  9. Be honest. Never lie. (The truth will come out. Don’t let it contradict you.) <\/li>\n
  10. The microphone is always hot. The phone line is always open. (Be careful what you say. Private is public.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve spent the last two years running WebEx events for the US Department of Labor. I learned in a trial by fire with large, national events being normal. I worked with the Secretary of Labor, the various Deputy Secretaries and I assisted with software rollouts, policy changes and training initiatives. I ran meetings for small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4144,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New Post - Little Book of Event Planning","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[624,976],"class_list":["post-4142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wrote-about","tag-event-planning","tag-rules-for-success"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/Planning-header.jpg?fit=2048%2C1536&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4143,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142\/revisions\/4143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}