The event planning form that replaced nine emails
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Somebody working on your event is going to show up with the wrong number. They were told the right one at some point in a conversation, and it's changed since then.
That's what happens when the details of an event move around by conversation, which is how almost every event runs until somebody decides otherwise. This post covers what I built to replace that on a conference for eight or nine hundred people, what changed, what didn't, and the three things that make an event planning form work when so many shared documents stop getting opened after two weeks.
Prefer to watch? The full breakdown is in the video below. Otherwise, let’s dive in.
The full picture of one room sat in about nine different places
The first really big project I ever ran was a global partner conference in Toronto, at a hotel conference center. Three or four days, somewhere between eight and nine hundred partners flying in, and sessions running at the same time in a lot of different rooms.
My piece of it was the session rooms. All of them, and everything each one needed: how many people were registered, what they wanted the room to look like, who was speaking, what AV they needed, and whether they were handing out worksheets and materials on the day. Every room had a different person behind it who wanted something slightly different, and all of them had to be right at the same time.
Any single room is manageable on its own. Running all of them at once, all day, checking each one still has what it needs while the next session is already starting, is the part that's hard. That jump, from one room to every one of them, is the same jump that shows up when an event grows from twelve people to a hundred and twenty.
Before I was part of it, all that information reached the team by email, by phone call, on a team call, whatever was happening that day. There were millions of emails, from different people, each one carrying a different piece of what a room needed. Somebody would send the AV requirements. Somebody else sent the room setup. A third person mentioned the speaker halfway down a reply about something else entirely.
So the full picture of any single room sat in about nine different places. If you wanted to know what room fourteen was doing, you went digging through your inbox, pieced it together, and hoped nothing had changed since the last message you found. That's the same reason your inbox can't tell you where your speakers stand: it holds every conversation, and it still can't show you a current picture of one thing.
It took a few rounds of that before I thought, okay, there has to be a much better way to manage this.
Two things were moving information around, and both of them looked like nothing
The first was my manager. She'd think she'd told me something when she hadn't. In her head, she'd already had the conversation, or she'd meant to have it, and then her day got interrupted because she was constantly getting pulled into other calls. So it never got relayed. I'd find out later, sometimes in passing, often because she'd say something in a way that assumed I already knew, and I'd go, wait, what? By then it had either delayed something or changed something that was already finished.
The second one is bigger, and it's the one I see everywhere. We worked with a lot of wider teams, and those teams had discussions that never made it to us. Somebody would have a conversation with me and tell me one thing. Then they'd meet with somebody else, have a different conversation, and their thinking would move. That change never came back to me.
Sometimes it doesn't occur to you to go back and update the person you spoke to on Tuesday, because in your head that conversation is finished. Other times you figure the information will reach them some other way, or you fully mean to go back to them and then you just forget. Somewhere in there, the ball gets dropped.
That's what I mean about good communication not being the fix. Everybody involved was communicating constantly. None of it was written down anywhere. The information had nowhere to live.
And that's exactly where the wrong number comes from. Somebody tells you thirty. Three weeks later it's fifteen, and the person who changed it told somebody else, in a different conversation, who had no reason to think you needed to know.
That number isn't trivia, either. It decides the space. End up with more people than you planned for and you might need a different room entirely, and by then the good ones are taken. End up with fewer and you might still need a different room, because twenty-two people in a room that seats fifty look like they're being swallowed by it, and that's not what you want anybody walking into.
What should an event planning form actually ask for?
Ask for every field you need to make a decision, in the same order every time, on one sheet per session or per vendor, with a date it's due back. Room count, setup, speakers, AV, materials.
When I built mine, it was a worksheet rather than a form, because that's what I had at the time. Every field I needed went on it in the same order: registered numbers, the setup they wanted, speakers, AV, materials. One sheet per session, because every session wanted something different, and it was the same sheet every time, so I could put any two of them side by side and compare. Then I sent it out and said, here, fill that out and send it back to me by this date.
We asked for as much detail on there as we could get, and that turned out to matter more than the fields themselves. The room assignments came out of those answers, because you can't put a session in a room until you know what's happening in there and roughly how many people to expect. It also showed us what people were planning to do, which meant we could spot things early. Somebody would request a stack of microphones for a group of eight, and we could go back to them about it right then rather than finding out on the day. A lot of it came down to getting people to a realistic version of what they were picturing.
If you want the field-level version of this for your own event, there's more in what belongs in your event planning spreadsheet.
The paper trail is the part I'd keep if I could only keep one
Two things changed once the sheets started coming back.
The first is that everything lived in one place and stayed on file, in the same shape as every other session. When I needed to know what a session needed, I opened one thing. I wasn't digging, I wasn't searching, and I wasn't going back to whoever had told me a month earlier to check whether it was still true. Somebody could ask me a question, and I could answer it right there.
The second one is my favorite. It became a paper trail. When somebody came back with a different answer than the one they'd given me, I could go to them and say, this is what you said, and now you're saying this. Never to win anything, and never to make anybody feel caught out. Just so the two of us could look at the same thing and work out which version we were going with, instead of comparing two memories of a conversation.
I'm a big believer in keeping everything in writing, because a lot of the time people forget what they said or did.
That isn't a character flaw. It's what happens to anybody who's working on your event on top of the actual job they were hired to do. So keep the paper trail. With your team, with your vendors, and especially with your venue, where the difference between what you remember agreeing and what's on the contract has a price attached. There's more on that in the vendor questions no one preps you for.
I still chased people constantly
A worksheet is not a magic wand, so here's the part that didn't change.
I still chased people. When you're working with that many people at a firm like that, most of them have plenty going on besides your event, so the deadline I gave them wasn't always the day it came back. The majority filled it out. There was the occasional bit of pushback about having to write it down instead of just telling me.
What the worksheet changed was what I was chasing. I wasn't chasing nine separate pieces of one session across nine email threads, trying to work out which piece was missing. I was chasing one sheet, from one person, and I could see at a glance which ones hadn't come back.
That's a smaller job, and it's a job somebody else could do for you, which the nine-threads version never was.
When it's your event, there's nobody to go back to
Here's the part that hits differently now that I run things for myself rather than for a firm.
At that conference, when something went sideways, there was somebody to go back to. There was a manager who'd had the conversation, or a team that had made the decision. The information existed somewhere outside of me, even if it took nine emails to find it.
When it's your event, you're both people. You're the one who had the conversation and thought you'd passed it on, and you're the one who needs the answer three weeks later. There's nobody to go and check with, because the person who had that conversation is you.
For a smaller event, you might get away with that. The more people you have involved, the more of those conversations there are, and every one that doesn't get written down exists only between you and whoever you had it with. That's before you get to somebody new joining you, or you wanting to be genuinely unreachable for a week. It's the same reason where your speaker information lives changes everything once more than one person needs to see it.
Written down, in one place, with a date attached
That conference didn't run better because everybody suddenly got better at communicating. Everybody was already communicating. What changed was where the information went once it was said.
Whatever you use, and it doesn't have to be a spreadsheet, three things about it are what make it work.
The information is written down rather than said, because a conversation only exists between the people who were in it. It lands in one place rather than nine, so there's somewhere to look instead of somebody to ask. And it has a date on it, because a request without a date is a suggestion, and suggestions come back last. That last one is why so many shared documents go quiet after a couple of weeks: nothing was ever due.
So this week, pick the one thing that currently reaches you in pieces, from different people, in different formats, on no particular schedule. It might be speaker requirements. It might be what your vendors need from you. It might be what each person on your team is bringing on the day. Build one place for it to land, ask for more detail than feels necessary, and give people a date to land it by.
Then keep the paper trail, because that's the part that saves you when somebody remembers it differently.
If the foundational pieces of your event have never actually been written down anywhere, The Event Brief is a free workbook that gets the whole thing onto one page: what your event is, who it's for, how many people, when, where, what you can spend, and what's still open.
