What goes into a great event? Part 4 - PROGRAMMING

What makes a great event? Part 4 – Programming

So with a suitable idea, budget and venue, we have the essential grounding for any event. The next step is to ensure that you have the right authors to take part in things. It's not always an easy thing to do, and again you have to make sure that the authors match the type of event you are running. First question on that is genre – are they writing in the sort of field that your event is in? Sometimes this isn't obvious, so it's worth considering this one carefully. The other issue is the scale of the event – if you have a capacity of 200, you wouldn't be thinking about getting Stephen King or JK Rowling along, as the likely expense of them attending would outweight the income for your event. On the other hand, if you have a capacity in the thousands, then suddenly those types of names become a lot more of a possibility.

For any event you are looking for your top names to draw audience to your event. Even better if you happen to be an existing fan of their work, but what you are largely looking at for an author is profile. Is this someone with a significant readership, someone who people want to hear speak, someone that people will pay their hard cash to come and see? Of course, the flipside of this is that these kind of authors are the ones who are constantly in demand, so the best advice I could give would be to get in touch with either them or their publishers nice and early. Plenty of advance notice is vital if you want to have a big-name author at the top of your bill. The author – and certainly their publishers – will probably want to know how many people will be attending the event, and what sort of thing will be expected of them. Audience expectations can be tricky to guess, but again it's always best to be realistic and not give crazy targets.

The other question is which approach to take on programming – schedule first and then authors, or authors first and then schedule? Every author brings something different to the table, as well as having their own established fan bases who will be delighted to see them at your event. It's easy to get carried away programming stacks of authors, but sometimes you find yourself having little for them to do at the event. As such, in a lot of case, I try and think of panels and workshop ideas ready so that I can try and match authors to those openings in the schedule. One of the first things I do is try and map out what rooms I have, what can go in each room and what panels or items might take place at any given moment. As such, all of your authors get to make a really worthwhile contribution to the event and as such get more out of being there.

That's all I'll say on programming – the next two parts will focus on marketing, with one half looking at traditional 'paper' marketing and the other zooming in on online marketing.