The 4 Essential “E”-s for Designing Enchanting Events: Experience, Evolving, Experiment, Engagement

As we love to say: “No event deserves to be mediocre”. Events are meant to enchant! They need to enlighten, connect, surprise and delight and to ultimately bring along progress, inspiration and enjoyment. There is no strict recipe for achieving that but we believe there are four invaluable ingredients you should always mix to prepare a mind-blowing event: create and experience, keep on evolving, never stop experimenting and always engage your attendees.

These E-words are quite easy to remember: all four of them begin with the favourite letter of any event prof – “E” like in “event”, but their introducing into your events require lots of skills, know-how and creativity. See why you should always bear these four E-words in mind when designing events and how to wheel them into your events, below.

Create an E xperience

If you ask someone what his/her most thrilling memory or biggest dream is, it’s quite unlikely to get answers like: buying a Ferrari or getting a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes for my birthday. Most answers would be something like: a trip to the Maldives, a visit to Walt Disney World (for every child out there and the kind of people who always stay kids like me), attending a concert of a favourite band/singer or parachuting (for the adrenaline seekers). People cherish and remember experiences, not things. Only experiences stick to our minds and hearts for good. To organise an exceptional and memorable event, you need to do just that – create an experience.

Experiences are the best (if not the only) means to achieve the ultimate goals of your event: from educating to inspiring or entertaining your attendees, there is no better teacher, guru or entertainer than the personal EXPERIENCE itself. For an event to become a real experience it should feel like an individual encountering for each and every attendee. That means that your event needs to evoke emotions, stimulate all the senses, engage (more about that below) and amaze every single attendee at your event. More on how to turn your event into experience read here.

Keep on E volving

The key to organizing better and better events is evolving: every new event you organize needs to surpass the previous one. To achieve that there are some basic steps you should follow:

Analyze your events

Your event might be over but not your work on it. Now is the time to make a thorough analysis of your event: evaluate its strengths and weaknesses; review the attendees’ feedback paying attention especially to the negative remarks; discuss the difficulties, oversights and accomplishments with your teammates; etc. Not doing so will doom your future events not only to boredom and lack of progress but also to making the same mistakes over and over again which a much more wiser person than me, namely Albert Einstein, called insanity.

Embrace your mistakes

We all make mistakes, it’s human and unavoidable. What’s important is to learn from them. They are the hardest but the best lessons you could get. So don’t be harsh on yourself about the little blunders and slips you’ve had during your last event. Instead, examine them carefully and think of ways to avoid them next time. Thus, from stumbling stones they might turn out to be the stepping-stones to your next great event.

‘Upgrade’ yourself

It’s not only your events that need evolving. It’s you who has to constantly work on yourself as an event professional in order to organize better events. Because you are the driving engine behind your event! Learning new skills and hacks and keeping up with the trends in the industry is the best investment you could make for your event. Whether you will attend different events for event profs, event management masterclasses and trainings or you will simply read Genioso Event Magazine, just never stop learning and improving yourself as an event prof!

E xperiment

Another essential E-word when it comes to events – experimenting. Trying new event formats, technologies, services, gadgets, approaches or unconventional venues is what will make the difference in your next event. Even small changes and innovations like a new image or а video on your website or a funky throwable microphone (like Catchbox) to use during your event could completely change the look and feel of your event and eventually its final outcomes. Yes, not all try-ons might be a success but your biggest mistake will surely be not going after new things! Stagnation and repetition are like seppuku for events. Enchanting events thrive only on creativity and innovation. So if there is one thing you should never be afraid of when organizing an event, that’s experimenting!

E ngage your Attendees

Long gone are the times when the event audience was just a passive spectator during the event. The Millennials need and demand more: they want to be active participants during your events, they’ve come to network and exchange experiences and know-how and will not put up with less.

To adapt to these changes, the event industry has undergo immense transformations the last decades: new interactive event formats have emerged; event technologies have encompassed the whole event management cycle – from the designing and marketing of the event to its conducting and follow-up stage, making our work as event profs not only easier but so much more exciting; moderators have become key figures in events, modelling the events like stand-up comedians and finding diverse and creative ways to include the audience into the dialogue; speakers have greatly changed their ways of presenting: (more and more) discarding pp presentations, actively interacting with the audience, discussing real case studies including ad-hoc ones coming directly from the attendees and so on.
Engaging your audience has become the number one priority when designing an event. The more creative and interactive ways you invent to do so, the better and more memorable your event will become.

Are these E-words the pillars of your wow-factor events as well? We will be delighted to hear how you turn your events to real successes.

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