Starting a group and planning events to host can be very stressful.
I have often seen that group admins feel overwhelmed with the tasks, they have to perform while keeping everyone happy in their group.
Hence, I have written this article to show you, 10 top tips which make you successful group admin and a successful event manager.
1. Begin as early as possible
Once you know why you want to start a group, you would want to make sure that you start doing preparation for it. For example, you would start brainstorming, with your co admins, about
- What kind of group you are going to start?
- What would be your group’s name?
- What sort of vision your group holds.
- What kind of people you would like into your group, etc.
Starting early will help you find out issues and you will be able to mitigate them before they become a pain.
2. Be flexible
Over the course of planning and starting a group. There will be lots of things, which are going to change.
Whether it is your group name, or it’s the persona of the group members or the location where you’re going to host event for your group.
But you just need to be flexible, so that you can prioritise to the group members needs.
This flexibility will help you to grow the group because it will impact how many people can join your group as part of their comfort.
3. Learn the art of haggling
When you start to grow, you will be looking for. Event venues. And despite how many venues you visit and see if they’re suitable for your events or not. When they give you their pricing, you can always negotiate.
The best example I can give you is when I used to host events in the Newcastle United Kingdom.
What I used to do is;
I used to go to the bars or clubs, primarily located in the centre of the city. And I used to ask them for the place or a part place of their bar or club to be privately provided to me so that I can host an event there.
Now, instead of paying them hefty fees. I used to negotiate that because I’m bringing more than 30 people into their club. They should give it to me for free.
And trust me, it works. 90% of the time. I mean, until and unless the bar or the restaurant or the club is super busy.
And because my group was more about technology. It was very obvious for me to host events on weekday evenings. And that worked out pretty well for me because, on a weekday evening bar, clubs or the restaurant is not that busy as it is on a weekend.
So, negotiating is something which you can always do while searching for a location.
4 Learn to delegate
When you start a group. You will find some co-founders for the group. If you don’t, then look more around because a group is all about people, and if you can’t find a couple of co-founders or at least one co-founder, then there is no point of starting the group.
And once you have a co-founder or group host. You should learn to assign responsibilities.
Break up various elements of your operations. For example, if you have a professional group, then you can assign or delegate the registration, and the venue selection task to your co-founder.
If you have a more laid back kind of group then you can delegate the marketing task to your co-founder, you need to learn this because you cannot do everything yourself. And it’s one of the most beneficial skill, you will every need, while you’re managing a group
5. Create a shared workspace
Now you must be wondering why would I need to create a shared workspace. Well, there are tons of benefits to it. Number one is you have to collaborate with your team, your co-founders and it could not be easier to do that with a shared worspace.
Let say for a moment you have a shared document in your shared workspace. In a shared document you can have details of your venues, your upcoming event attendee lead. You can also have your speaker’s details, your cost models etc.
You can all do that by starting a group with bylde.
6. Always have a Plam B
Now, you might not know that being a group admin, and hosting events have lots of uncertainties.
And because of this, You always need a backup plan. It is very rare that an event can ever be pulled off without at least one or two issues. So it’s always a good idea to have a plan B ready.
Whenever I used to host an event, I always asked my co-host to bring his laptop, because I knew that not all the venue has all peripheral devices to connect my laptop with their projector.
But I also knew that sometimes bringing a MacBook for a presentation at a general venue is not compatible, whereas a PC peripheral device like a USB connector or HDMI connector is easy to find.
And having an extra device with us always helped out. But this is just one small example you can find tons of such examples for having a backup plan.
