Your goal is to make your events the best they can be 鈥� for the attendees, but also for you and your team. But that alone isn鈥檛 a goal you can rally around for 2019.
鈥淓vents are fun, but for most organizations, you don鈥檛 do them for their own sake,鈥� says Joshua Zerkel, the Head of Global Community at Asana. Zerkel is also a Certified Professional Organizer庐 and the founder of Custom Living Solutions, one of the Bay Area鈥檚 premier productivity and organizing consulting firms.
Without specific, measurable goals, you can鈥檛 gauge how you鈥檙e doing as the year rolls along. You鈥檙e at peak motivation in January, but if your goals are too vague, you鈥檒l find yourself somewhere between totally uninspired and wallowing in a sea of self-doubt by June.
To set goals that are ambitious, achievable, and keep you motivated all year long, look to Zerkel and his team at Asana鈥檚 approach. They threw 24 customer events in rapid succession in late 2018, and along the way learned the do鈥檚 鈥斅燼nd don鈥檛s 鈥斅爋f successful goal-setting for events.
Here鈥檚 their advice on how to set goals that will elevate your events 鈥� and your experience creating them 鈥斅爐hroughout the year.
Tie goals back to the 鈥渨hy鈥� of your events
Whether you鈥檙e in charge of experiential marketing for a bigger company, or create events that are the business, your events support a larger mission. Keep that mission in mind when you set your team鈥檚 goals for the year.
Zerkel has this advice: 鈥淭o make your events impactful and relevant, you have to connect them with your organization鈥檚 greater initiatives and goals.鈥� Zerkel and Logan LeVan, a marketing manager at Asana, are tasked with recruiting other team members at Asana to help with events. And Zerkel and team quickly realized that if they don鈥檛 clearly spell out their event鈥檚 purpose, other team members may ask, 鈥淲ait, why are we doing this event?鈥�
So Zerkel and LeVan took the time to write up a clear purpose statement for the events 鈥斅爋ne tied to the organization鈥檚 overall 鈥渨hy.鈥� With everyone understanding the big picture, other coworkers were more motivated to help. 鈥淔rom the executive team on down, all teams need to understand the purpose of any major initiative,鈥� LeVan says.
鈥淚f you can become a champion for your organization, creating events that are in clear support of goals bigger than your own, ultimately, it makes your own life easier, because everyone else will back you up,鈥� Zerkel says.
Make your goals measurable
Once you鈥檝e determined the 鈥渨hy,鈥� it鈥檚 time to assign specific tactical goals that will help you achieve your purpose.
For instance, you might have identified that for your business to achieve its goal of becoming a thought leader in your industry, your conference needs to grow to the biggest in your space. But don鈥檛 stop there. Define what that means with a clear and measurable goal like:
Increase conference attendance 150% year over year.
Or, your goal might be to make a stronger impression on attendees. Translate that to something like:
Test five new ideas to make this event experience different than the last.
Once you have a measurable goal, make sure you note how you鈥檙e going to track progress toward that goal. Specify what tool you will use to gather the data (for instance, if your goal is attendance, use your event management platform鈥檚 reporting features), and how often you will share your progress with your team and executives (like with once a week).
Build goals that can adapt with you
No matter how well-planned your goals are, 鈥渆vent planning and management is iterative,鈥� Zerkel says. 鈥淵ou can go in with a goal in mind, but you鈥檙e dealing with a lot of moving parts, including partners outside your company over which you likely have little control. You won鈥檛 know how a new event series is going to go until you鈥檝e done it a few times.鈥�
Take learnings from each event you do and adjust your goals based on those learnings. If limiting factors like venue capacity or weather throw you a curveball, leave yourself room to get creative with how you hit your goal. For example, if your goal was to reach 1,000 attendees, but the only available venue has a capacity of 500, you might try livestreaming the event to reach the same number of people.
At the end of the day, your goals need to be much more than forgettable New Year鈥檚 resolutions or vague aspirations. They need to be motivating milestones you aspire to all year long.
Make 2019 your best year yet with more advice from the Asana events team in The Event Professional鈥檚 Ultimate Guide to Productivity: 2019 Edition.
