– Welcome to Iclick2learn member event. Review Your Event Plan in 2022. We’re exceptionally excited to have the wonderful Lori Modde with us. Lori is a… My gosh, she’s been in tourism events, volunteers, marketing, sponsorship, promotion, you name it around this piece and particularly with a focus on rural regional remote, which is also really great. ‘Cause I know we’ve got a large number of you, some in very small communities and some in tourism communities. So you’ll get a lot from what Lori has to share and she’ll give you a bit of an overview on what she has to share shortly. Many of you are familiar with how we run it, but I’ll just do a quick overview. We will be recording the session and it will be available in the library as well. So you’ll be able to catch up post training and re-watch it. If there’s anything that you wanted to catch up again on, or to show somebody else in your committee or staff, or point them to that resource. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to pop those in chat. Lori will be monitoring chat as she goes along. So she’ll be able to answer those questions, but obviously we have a Q&A segment as well. Now we don’t record, whilst the recording will be happening for the whole period of the workshop, the Q&A segment, you’ll be invited to come off mute and to actually have a discussion and engage. That part of the recording we will remove for the final library so that you can feel confident to share information without all people that you don’t know, who it is watching it. So Lori will let you know when it’s a Q&A segment and just be assured that that will be removed from the final video. So without any further… I think I’ve captured the main things. We may see some people coming in as well, and I’ll let them know that information as they come in. But I would like to, again, welcome you to Review Your Event Plan. I would love to acknowledge our traditional owners of the lands that we’re all coming in from very different areas and different states of Australia. So extend that acknowledgement to the country that you’re coming in from, I’m in . And as I said, you’re all in different states. And again, warmly welcome Lori, I’ll ask Lori to do a bit of a brief intro. So you’ve got a little bit of a background, but she’s your… As I said go to girl for anything to do with tourism advance economic impact projects in rural, regional, and remote, particularly, and volunteering. So Lori, over to you.

– Thanks Nat for inviting me. And I really love the opportunities to talk about this and I will try to get it down to an hour I promise, but yeah, let’s see how we go. I’ve crammed a lot in today ’cause I really want to make sure you get the most from this session, ’cause this is what I have viewed as the most critical time to review event. And I’ll go into a little bit more depth very soon, but firstly also I’d like to voluntarily acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands that we all meet today. And I come from Garanga and Dharawal country. And look, I think it’s really important at this point to say how important our connection with our Aboriginal clan and our traditional owners are in the experience that we bring to people in events and tourism on a day to day basis. So let me tell you a little bit about myself and as Nat said, events and tourism is my gig and amongst other things. When I look at the history and what I’ve been lucky enough to be part of, I have actually gone from Broken Hill to Sydney Olympic Park and everywhere in between and place making combined with visitor experience combined with events is really the space that I’ve been in and connecting with the visitor economy. So I’ve been incredibly lucky to curate, to own, to manage and to have their results of the past. And lucky enough also of win some major awards for some of the work that I’ve done. Some of the place making stuff, you can see a little bit of a snapshot there of one thing that we made sure events combined with place making was really the key. But we also love as any event manager does, is promoting those that we actually love to meet. And people really do make the events part of the experience. So that’s enough about me. You don’t need to know anymore, but what we might do is go into what we’re terming a Q&A session now. But I really want to hear from you just briefly so I can understand the relevance of what I’m going to be talking about. So if we can jump into that. Firstly, who is here today? And we might just go around the screen, if that’s okay. I need to know why is your event run? What is your purpose and what is keeping you up at night? What are the concerns you have about your event? Kim, do you want to kick off? ‘Cause you’re the first on my screen there.

– Okay, hi everyone. We manage two events. We manage the agricultural show here, annual agricultural show. And we also manage the quarter drive-in, which is run every month.

– Awesome. Okay, great.

– There’s something really that keeps us up at night. I think we just want to tag into how we can grow. COVID had a huge impact on our driving. Not so much our show ’cause we had cancelled the year before, so it was fantastic last year, but of course this should be coming up, is it going back down again and not have as many people and how do we keep that interest there?

– Yeah, brilliant. And why is your events run? Can you give me a bit of an indication of why they actually occur? Why that happen?

– The annual show has been going for over 80 years, so that’s run by… Well, we help the core of agricultural society run that. It’s a major event for our town and surrounding areas. It allows us to showcase what we do and the drive in is just so unique and one of very few still operating. So that’s owned by the shire that managed by us.

– Yep, great. Thanks Kim. Sue we might jump to you next if that’s okay.

– Hello, I’m Sue. I’m Sue and I’m from Leeton. I’m here representing the LEAP Jumpstart fund, which is a fund where we raise funds and pool the money for people in crisis in need in our community. So we have an assessment committee that assessed and then hand out the money. It’s an amazing organisation, but what happened about the middle of last year, it nearly folded because of volunteer for fatigue and the funds had run really low. So we had a public meeting and from that public meeting, we got a brand new committee. We’re able to get some funds from FRRR to employ coordinator.

– Amazing.

– We’re really now looking at doing events and because most of the committee are new and rather raw, we’re looking at ways to do things smarter. And I thought this was a great opportunity. Our coordinator couldn’t be here today, although she has registered and our chairperson as well, they’re both working at other jobs, but they’ll be able to see the replay. And I thought it was really, really important that we come to this and yeah, lay foundations and-

– Fabulous.

– Really got things in mind. We’re looking for big things. We’ve done some raffles and things, but we’re looking for some great ideas.

– So wonderful. Well done on that recovery. Great move. Wonderful, we might go to Angela next if she’s there.

– Hi.

– How are you?

– Good. Yeah, I don’t know which hat to wear at the moment. I do a lot of different events, the Business Chamber, Community Connect and Rotary.

– Awesome.

– I guess the Blessing of the Fleet festival is my primary event that I’m the chairperson of a small committee. It’s a very big festival that brings thousands and thousands of people to town. All our accommodation houses are booked out. It’s been going for 66 years now. And so traditionally it’s a fishing town here in Aldila. So the boats are blessed as part of the ceremony. And then we have a massive street parade with floats and our princesses. There’s a princess fall two weeks before the festival and there’s a crowned princess and a runner up and the second runner up. So they all sit up on their floats with all the other princesses in the pageant.

– Wonderful.

– Then there’s about three stages with different entertainment going all day. And then there’s also a kids club to programme for-

– So why is it run?

– Sorry.

– Why is it run?

– Why? Okay, so traditionally it was run as a community event and it’s really grown so big now that it actually serves a lot of purposes. It is a community event and it’s great for locals. We’ve got third generation princesses where their grandmother was a princess. Their mother was a princess, so it’s a local community service, but also it’s a tourism attraction. So it’s arguably great for our town. It really did help put it on the map. It has grown quite big. And now what keeps me up at night is just a small committee. I need more volunteers and sponsorship’s hard sometimes as I touched on with Natalie recently at a workshop, we fall in the school holidays. A lot of the time Easter changes by three weeks, each year because of the moon. And it’s held on Easter Sunday every year. So our problem is funding. We’ve had problems with state government, with the flagship, especially saying, the people will come anyway. It’s school holidays. We’re not giving you any money.

– Cool. No, that’s really great. Thank you very much for that. Ruth, are you there?

– [Angela] Angela’s got… Am I there?

– Yes, Angela.

– [Angela] Right, I worked out how to unmute.

– Wonderful.

– [Angela] So I’m from Bribie Island, Environment Protection Association. We’re a team of volunteers mostly retired, but we’re really trying to expand the membership to be a wide cross section. Every year we run a Wildflower Walk. Now, when you say the purpose of it as is typical in probably in volunteer organisations, there’s a great interference and there’s new committee coming board and they’re keen to open up and really develop the community. So up until now the Worldflower Walk has been more geared towards members of the association of which there’s about 150.

– [Lori] Brilliant.

– [Angela] But to really communicate with the community so that they really understand just what is here, because we do have quite amazing vegetation here. And we would like to open this up. So this is going to involve training, marketing a whole raft of things. We’re a bit overwhelmed as to just from low key to something that the community can participate in.

– Great, I hope you got your pen ready? Thanks Angela. That’s fabulous. Ruth, how are you going? What’s your event?

– Sorry, I’m the coordinator of the Albany Farmers’ Market. So it’s a weekly event.

– Awesome.

– Yeah, so I guess… I suppose that we’re an independent organisation, so we’re all self-funded, don’t seek any outside funding, so that’s all fine. And all our board is all our members couple of board are our farmers. So I’m not sure that it’s keeping me up at night, but I guess that one thing for me is that as the only paid person I have lots of things that I would like to do. But I’m conscious that ultimately my first priority is to make sure that the market runs every week. And then also I’m very conscious that my board, is you know they’re all farmers who pretty much work seven days a week.

– Cool, and why is the farmer’s market run?

– So basically it just turned 20 a couple of weeks ago. And before that, most of the produce from region fresh produce from the region was trucked out of the region. And it was very hard to find local produce and buy it locally. So it was started to bring farmers and consumers together so that farmers could go direct to their public and get a fair price for their produce. And so that local people could access local produce, but it has become since then more than that, it’s become a very important social occasion for people. And also it’s become quite a tourist attraction because it is an authentic farmer’s market, just fresh produce apart from like coffee and some food and music and stuff.

– Great, thank you. And thank you everyone. And I know I’d love to continue the conversation, but trying to get it into the timeframe which we have today. That gives me a really good snapshot. And so first of all, Nat, can we hold another session please, just on focusing in on our visions and whys? I think we’ve got to get a-

– I love that. That’s definitely Lori, thank you, it was definitely that.

– There’s some great stuff there that I would really like to pull out because I can’t emphasise enough. And you’ll probably this through the presentation that your purpose and why you actually do what you do can set the foundation up for success a lot quicker than if you did not have that vision. And I will touch on it as we go through, but I cannot stress enough. Your ability to articulate that vision is incredibly important. So let’s go firstly into, I’m sure we all know what an event is, but I’m going to tell you what I think it is. And it is a way to engage your customers in an experience that is the word of the day experience that enables them to connect with a purpose or an outcome. So, first of all, think in your head, what is your experience? And then how could it connect to a purpose or outcome. As we go through this presentation, I want you to only think about your events and how we can connect this content with what you do in your particular events. Okay, the first thing we’re going to do is look at the structure of an event. And as I say, that vision, that purpose, that why is the first thing. Now, we haven’t got time to pull that out today and go through how we can do that, but certainly we’re going to give you some tip bits on where we can actually start developing our event from that. And that goes down to one particular item. Now, does everyone understand what I mean by purpose vision and why first? Is there any quick questions on that? No, okay, good. The second part, once you’ve understood that is then developing your customer experience. So once we know what we’re trying to achieve, we’re going to provide an experience that matches that vision that people can engage with. And the third thing is that you need to develop objectives, outcomes. If you cancel KPIs, anything that is able to be reported against so that you can show your committee, your volunteer network, your board of directors, your counsellors, that you are producing something that is a sustainable event. Now that could mean one event, if it’s a one off or an ongoing operation, but regardless your experience does sit aside of where you concentrate your objectives and your outcomes. So let’s look at vision purpose and why first. And I always say to any board or any group that is managing an event to look at a playbook. Now I’m stealing Patrick Mouratoglou’s word when I say playbook, if anyone’s read his books, he’s quite an inspirational leader in this space around corporate knowledge and also visioning where businesses need to go. So we need to create a playbook and that helps us set our vision. So first thing you’ve got to do when you look at your playbook is what do you stand for? What does the group of people, the organisation, the individual potentially, what do you stand for? First question you need to answer. The second question is how do you behave now? What that does is takes your why and matches it with your values. Your values are incredibly important when it comes to the next stages of an event plan. So again, this is the top layer. We’re trying to understand who we are. The third thing we do is what do we do? What is it we actually do on a day to day basis or in the event itself? So i.e., what is the product? What are we delivering? What’s the service? The fourth thing we must get through all of our leaders on our boards and all our committees is what does success look like? How will we succeed? How do you know when you’ve come to the end of the event, you’ve gone, “That’s exactly what we wanted.”? That is success. The fifth thing is what is most important right now? The challenge with any vision or why is that, it is only able to be connected to visitors and people to engage in that if it’s relevant to the day. So by reflecting on what’s important right now, it is exceptionally important to connect that to the every day. And what’s actually going on. Don’t madly scribe down. You will get these slides at the end of the presentation, but certainly jot down what’s really important to your event as we go. The sixth thing is who must do what? Now, take your point, Ruth, if your last man standing, sometimes all of it rests with you, but when you have a committee or a board of directors, certainly there has to be some acknowledgement of shared responsibility. And by defining that it is a pinnacle point to getting active engagement from that board or that group of volunteers, regardless of their volunteers, they have a position that they have signed up for. And we need to understand that by pure transparency of communication, we can actually get some results. So sit down and say, “Okay, who can do what? Who is here to help? Who can do little bits and pieces?” The seventh thing is, “Okay, we know what success looks like, but how do we know when we’ve actually got there?” That’s a very different analogy that comes down to probably your KPIs and what you’re looking for. But it’s really important to have this conversation. Does everyone feel like they can have this conversation with their group of people? Yep, awesome stuff. ‘Cause this is your playbook. I’ve done this with several organisations I work with and that playbook sits on their desk or on the wall. And they continually reflect to it because it sets the scene for what is going to happen in your event plan. So now let’s jump into developing the customer experience. Now we’ve set what the committee want to do, the board of directors want to do, we understand our vision, we understand our purpose and why we’re existing. Oh, and just another quick tip bit if you’re not grasping the reason why the why is so important, Google Simon Sinek, the Golden Circle for me as a bit of homework and have a look at his video there on understanding why it’s so important to have a why. Okay, so let’s jump into developing a customer experience. When we look at your event and we match with customer’s needs, that middle part where it combines is where magic happens. We can have event patrons come in, but if we’re not talking to them and satisfying their needs, they tend to be the people that exit quicker than the ones that satisfied, engaged customer. So we’re aiming for that little middle bit. Now the challenge that and the rule of thumb, when it comes to understanding how to get a satisfying experience is to know your product, which I think we all do. We need to know who our customers actually are. And then ’cause we can only create this magic in here if we know what those customers needs are. Does that make sense? Okay, so today’s world, we’re had a different dynamic to where we were two years ago. This is probably the most crucial time that any business, any event, anyone needs to take stock and review. I’m going to take you through some real clear challenges that we have before us, but also some clear opportunities. Again, keep a reference to yourself of what’s applicable to my event and just write down some ideas as they come to you that you might trigger as we talk through them. So exactly what Justin today says is exactly what I believe. This is an amazing fast paced time that we live in. This change that we’ve gone through as probably the fastest we’ve ever gone through change ever. But what we need to know is it’s never going to slow down again. Now that we know that we can change in the pace that we are and things are changing around us, that pace is not going to slow. So what we call the VUCA market, which is the volatile, uncertain, I can’t remember what the C is and A is… Can’t think, what’s VUCA stand for Nat? Put it in the chat for me. But that market is exactly what we’re in today and we will continue to do so as market shifts, change quite dramatically. So let me take you through some of the stuff that we need to know. Look, we know that development will continue to change. We’re seeing development everywhere in regional areas. We’re seeing it in areas we haven’t seen it before. We have seen an explosion of social media and the take up in certain areas of marketing that did not exist even 10, 15 years ago. We’re seeing social change. We’re seeing people behave differently. We’re seeing new requirements of social interactions come into play. We’re seeings booms in technology. Who would’ve thought a camera could be five times as more powerful as the most expensive camera you can. Which I think back in the day when I was at that, it was around about six and a half thousand dollars to buy that thing. Now my iPhone can do exactly the same if not more. Then we’ve got new technologies coming in. I don’t know if anyone knows what the balls are on the bottom left there, but for someone that also does alert a lot of work with the outdoor recreation area, these are balls that heat up and can heat food in any condition without electricity. So in the back of the blue mountains, if you are hiking, you can take these balls stick them into your soup. Two minutes later, your soup’s boiling hot. Then you’ve got growing nature without sunlight, without anything to do with nature. You’re growing it within rooms that are set up for growth. It’s amazing. But what we need to do as event managers is understand social demography, and what’s actually happening with the interaction of our customers. Like I said before, we need to understand our customers and we need to understand needs of our customers. I pinch McCrindle stuff all the time. because I think McCrindle are amazing demographers and they do some great research in what people are doing and changing, so that people like us can ensure that we adapt our products and our services to the needs of the market. The first thing I want to throw up there is our growing linguistic diversity. Needless to say, pre-COVID we saw huge growth in migration. We will continue to see that as we… Oh, thanks for the VUCA as well. I just saw that. And we are going to continue to see that as borders start opening up. But we do still have right now a huge linguistic diverse community. And that’s not just in the capital cities anymore. That is exploding into other areas of Australia. The other thing that came out of their report was financial outlook. 63% of Australians believe they’re going to be in a better situation in 2031 financially. So they’ve got a lot of hope about financial situation. Ageing population, we’re seeing this. We’ve been hearing about this for quite a while now, and it’s about to hit us. We’re seeing a huge growth in the ageing population in Australia. Changing consumer behaviour. We’re seeing ethical interactions, like we’ve never seen before. We’re seeing support for local suppliers, like we’ve never seen before. And there’s this emerging acceptance of, “We need to do more for the planet.” There we go. And then the other things that are coming through is the hybrid environment, which I’m sure you’re all either experienced or seeing in your areas where hybrid is real. Hybrid working environments are here to stay. What does that mean for our services, and our products, and our events. There’s strong collaboration now when people do get together, but the distance in working from home. So they’re seeing that there’s stronger relationships with colleagues because it’s that time you do have together, is more worth while. That goes to the work-life balance about 61%, so that they will continue to do work-life balance. I think for the others, they just can’t ’cause that’s not an option for their work. But it’ll be interesting to see where this heads into the future. Rise of the regions. And I’m sure you have all seen your real estate prices go up, your market down wherever you’re, has really shifted. And we’re starting to see a lot of people exit city regions and head into regional, and the want to do that, also. So not only the people that have, but that want. And hybrid environments certainly have opened up that opportunity. There’s also a huge growth of the wellbeing acceptance that people are now seeing that they need to look after themselves, whether COVID gave us a little bit of a hit of understanding that our lives aren’t infinite, or what are we. But we’re seeing a rise in health wellbeing, and an acceptance to look more into a better lifestyle. So then they’ve broken it up into eight, sorry. Yes, eight different… Sorry, six, no, eight. That’s right, eight areas. And these are the eight trends that we’ve got really consider when looking at the future. The first one is a two-speed growth. So we’re looking at regional growth, downfall in national city locations. We’re looking at intentional lifestyle. So this goes with the health and wellbeing, but it’s also that regional migration, people being a lot more intentional about how they live their life, and not just going with the flow, which is what happened, pre-COVID. Revenge spending. I love this one. I’m going to spend it on experiences and loved ones because I don’t want to miss out on those opportunities anymore. This is a big takeaway for everyone on this screen. It is about experience. How do we give people the experiences that they’re willing to spend that money on? The fourth one, relational fitness. The hassle of going out. Don’t you love the acronyms these demographers come up with? This actually has said that a lot of social interactions are now not happening because of that hassle now. They’ve got used to their lifestyle. They got used to being at home, and it’s a difficult now transition to get people out into social activities in social settings. The metaverse not too relevant to us right now, but I’m sure everyone is very well aware that technology innovation will continue to rise. And we need to be certainly well aware of it, particularly when it comes to new opportunities to help us automate and make our lives a lot easier when it comes to delivering events. Social impact. This is about that ethical consideration that I spoke about a little while ago. So how do we communicate our ethical interactions with our event that we can engage people that are looking for that? New federalism. So this is about the pride in the state. As borders started to shut, people went… I’m starting to be very patriotic about New South Wales. “Now we’re doing the right thing. Victoria is not and WA is not, or whatever the case may be.” But we’ve been very patriotic because of whatever happened over COVID. So it’s an interesting change. Great retention. Now this is not just workers. And as I think it was, Sue who said, this is about volunteers as well. This is about retaining those engaged in what you’re doing because now the shift is, what’s happened in the world has got people thinking about really what they want to do in the future. So there’s a lot to take in there, but I think it’s really important that we continue to stay engaged with what’s actually happening. So let’s just summarise it. More regional population. What does that mean for us? Potentially more attendees, potentially more people to engage in our events, potentially more volunteers. Cultural diversity. How is your event interacting with cultural diversity? Are you providing different types of menu options now where there might be a religious or a cultural exclusion to certain food? Is there different languages in your event to cater for those people that might be of different cultural background? How are you engaging this new wave of cultural diversity that is coming into Australia? Ageing population, yep. Definitely more volunteer opportunities. And I don’t want to put that as we only have ageing volunteers. That’s not the case. The ones that are coming into semi-retirement or retirement are a great opportunity for volunteerism. So as our population ages, thus we’re getting more people into a semi-retired or retired state, and we might have some more volunteer opportunities. Regressing on socials, which we said that fear of going out. That is a marketing challenge. That is a reality for any event today. How are we going to capture our market, bring them back to our events, and make them feel like it’s worthwhile, make them feel like they’re going to get something from that experience that you’re offering? Increase spending on experiences. Here is where the biggest opportunity is that any event today. And this comes into innovation, and I don’t have time to give you my three-hour workshop on innovation, but we need to really look at how we innovate to increase that experience engagement. And can I just give you one thing, if not anything else from today? I want you to try to articulate what experience you offer that someone can promote to someone else. What are they saying about your event? How are they articulating that experience? If you’re not grappling with that, we need to do some work on your experience. The next one, ethical considerations. Let’s talk about clarity of message. Let’s talk about where your ethics are. What sort of environmental messages are you sending or doing as part of your event? Whose charities are you supporting? What does that person coming to that event result in an ethical frame? Hybrid working. This is a really big opportunity for regions. And I don’t think we’ve really understood this just yet. But with hybrid working, it means that they can work from anywhere. So the family can go on holiday in a non-peak time and can be in a location where they can engage in a tourism environment while technically being at work. Take a couple of hours off in the morning, and you’re having a tourism experience. Work in the afternoon, and you’re back at work. So, this has a huge opportunity for tourism, but also events and anything in regional locations. Health and wellbeing focus, we talked about. And this is an experience opportunity. How do you get that health and wellbeing focus into your event, that experience that you’re offering, connecting with those people that really do want to look after themselves, and see that change where they’ve come out of COVID. And probably the most important one, which I can emphasise is probably the biggest challenge that events will face today. The lockdown is over. So, how are we going to catch up on all the funds we’ve lost in the last couple of years? How are we going to get back to where we were, if not growth? Everyone’s thinking the same. I did a search result on Sydney Events for the next seven days, and there’s 129 of them. I did a search on Blue Mountains, and there’s 66. It is a noisy, noisy, noisy market. So the key for anyone that is looking at events is how do you cut through? How do you cut through to your customers and actually present your event as the must-experience event? We haven’t got time to go through the ideas, unfortunately, but I’m sure you’ve had a bit of a think around some of those things that we’ve just addressed. But I will ask if there’s any questions. So I’ll just stop there and ask, is anyone want any clarity. on what we’ve actually covered?

– [Ruth] Yes, please

– [Lori] Go for it, Ruth.

– [Ruth] Just a quick question in terms of getting a handle on how the regional population has grown or otherwise, and cultural diversity. Can you point to any-

– Resources? Yeah, thank you.

– Yep, absolutely. Your local council is the best place you can go, Ruth. Local council, most of them, if not all of them, subscribe to one component of ID profile or REMPLAN, which are demographic data. Now they can pull a report like that, that will tell you the shifts in the migration in that area, as well as the growth. Now we have a huge opportunity about to present us, which the census is coming out very soon. from the last one we did. Am I the only one that gets excited about censuses? This is a really important knowledge piece when you’re looking at anything to do. with understanding markets and market shifts. But thanks. Nat should put up the profile ID web address there. You can have a look at your age if council allows public access. So if they do, it’ll certainly be up there on that website. If they don’t allow public access go through to your economic development department or your community development department say, “Can you please provide this information?” And they should be able to provide it for you.

– [Ruth] Oh, that’s fantastic. Thanks so much for that.

– Pleasure. Any other questions?

– I think one of the interesting things, I’ll just put in chat, just doing a brain dump of my thoughts as well is around, these are all opportunities for us to engage volunteers. and engage sponsors. The Conscious Consumers report that Hailey + Co did a round sponsorship and support for communities, which I’ll find the link and put in chat as well. And if you’re watching the recording, it’s underneath video, was very much around people support things with purpose and sponsors are really doing that as well. Aren’t they?

– Correct, yeah, absolutely. And I think sponsors are being a little bit more conservative, obviously with their funds on the basis of the noise that is out there, and how many approaches they’re getting. So they’re relying their own purpose and vision. And look, if there’s another sponsor out there that hasn’t aligned with their purpose and vision, I couldn’t even tell you one that hasn’t. So the key response is to go to their purpose and vision, and try to match it with yours. That’s a perfect alignment. ‘Cause as soon as you’ve got that perfect alignment, everything should flow. Awesome, no more questions? We’ll keep going. Yep, fabulous, great. So what we’ve covered, we’ve gone through the vision purpose and the why, and we’ve structured a playbook that will help us articulate that as your organising committee or your board of directors. Then we’ve looked at, we need to develop a customer experience. And what have we got to consider? Who are our customers? What do they want? How do we get them engaged? And what experience do we need to provide them to match their needs? Then we look at developing objectives and outcomes for that sustainable operation. And that’s really where the event plan sings. An event plan is a way to deliver your organization’s vision and purpose. But your event plan adds to your Playbook. Your Playbooks start, your event plan is then the follow on, ’cause it shows you how to do it, so you can meet your organisation objectives, and you’re able to do it again, and again, and again. This is your sustainable approach. So when we get to developing the customer experience, what have we got to consider? The easiest way I can articulate is a little bit like marketing. You have a product, you have a customer, and you’re meeting them in the middle. So if anyone has done textbook marketing, you’ll know the four piece or what has become the seven piece. This is no different. Customer experience or in today’s world it’s called CX. Customer experience is about marketing. It’s about taking your product and your experience using the seven Ps of marketing to make sure it is a connection to your market. So we look at product. What is the product? What is the experience? What is the event that you’re putting on? And what promotions are you doing to reflect that experience? How are you communicating it? But what’s the price offer that also matches that, the place in which you are doing the event? Is there some way you can articulate that better, provided it’s part of the experience? Remember, every one of these has an experience add on. So it’s not just going through the throw and saying, “Yep, on our event plan, it says that we must do a promotion in here.” How does it reflect the experience? If you’re doing a promotion with a partner, or you’ve got a partner involved, do their vision and mission aligned with what you are trying to do? How does that reflect the experience that the event is offering? Are they a key component to what you are going to give a customer when they come to that event? Your people, your volunteers, how are you informing them or educating them, or providing the tools that deliver the experience? Is everyone understanding what I’m saying here? Your experience is really the bottom line. This is your common denominator. Where are you embedding that experience in all of those different areas? And if you’re not, let’s review it. Let’s have a look on how you can communicate that experience better. Now we’ve got our experience. We understand what our event is. We know what we’ve got to do. It’s on the mind map on the white board, or it’s on an A4 sheet, A3 sheet of paper on the boardroom table. Whatever the case is. Now we’ve got to consider the elements of the business of the event plan, which is down to resources, delivery, and risk. Now the easiest way to look at this and not forget any particular item that you need to think about is using the acronym STEEPLE. Has anyone heard of STEEPLE before? Think about climbing to the STEEPLE or some people call PESTLE, whichever word rings to you, and you can spell it right, that’s the key to use. But STEEPLE is what I use because it makes me remember all the different elements that I should be considering with my resources and with my risk. So what does STEEPLE stand for? Social, this is your people. This is your interaction. This is exactly where you get. people connecting with people. So it could be your, as I say, volunteers. It could be your staff. It could be your community groups. It could be where you are getting that magic action, to deliver your experience with people. Technology, what resources and delivery opportunities do you have with the current technologies that are available? Environment, how are you looking at your environmental considerations? How are you using the environment to deliver your experience? Economic comes down to budgets. This is the fun part of any event. Isn’t it? Economics is where you know that you’re going to have that sustainable approach, of course, but it’s about the shifting of where that money goes into, which areas, to make the biggest impact on your experience. People often laugh at me when I say political, but I think probably only you’re a great example of that, . where political influences immensely on a lot of different areas when it comes to events. So if you don’t have your political resources aligned from day dot, it could be a problem down the track. And that’s why we also emphasise it in the risk area. So what political resources can you use to deliver? What political considerations do you need to deliver? And that could come down to grants. What areas that you could fit into various grants that are run by government departments, or it could be engaging with a political plan, or a vision that your local member has, and connecting with that. Legal goes without saying. We’ve really got to look at our legal obligations as not for profits, as small entities, but we’re still publicly having to respond to our governance models and making sure. that we’ve got that aligned within our resources. And that last one there is the add-on, which used to be PESTEL or PESTLE because ethical considerations, like we discussed in some of the demography shifts that are happening. We have to look at how’s that pub talk going? Is that going to rest well at the pub type of conversation. in everything we do today? Is it going to end up on the front page of the paper? Where’s our values? Where’s our vision? And how does that align with our ethics? Which goes back to the Playbook and looks at your values. So making sure all of that aligns is very important when it comes to ethical. And risk management is no different. So it’s taking all of those seven areas, looking at your resources, and then having a separate column next to that, that says, “Well, that’s fine. We’re going to do this. But what are the risks that we need to also identify?” Once you identify some of those risks in those areas, you can easily connect them back to that resource and address that in what we call the mitigation strategy. And it becomes part of your delivery. So resourcing risk mitigation back to your resource and delivery. So this is what it looks like. We start with our experience. We look at product. We look at people, place, promotion, partnerships, price, processes, that delivers our experience for our customers. The next step is we look at the resources, and we look at our PESTLE or our STEEPLE, whichever way you want to look at it. And we identify all of those different areas with the resources that we need to be able to deliver on that experience. We then look at our risks to make sure we haven’t forgotten anything, and we can feed it backwards to our resources. But once we’ve done all that, then it’s very easy to structure what I call an operational plan. But it is. It’s a timeline. It is a timeline of what needs to be done by when, to get to the event day to run the event. How are we feeling? I want to ask a question at this point. I think that might be a good place to just stop for a minute.

– Lori.

– Yep.

– [Angela] Give an example of the resources risk mitigation.

– Yep, no worries. So I’ll pick none of your events with this. Let me think. I’m going to look at a conference because it’s a little bit different. But if you’re running a conference for an industry to try to get ideas about its future, when it comes to resources, we know that politically we need to probably get a very good mixture of the industry there, because no one needs to be sidelined. So in our risk area we’re going to identify that some people are left out. Now that’s very important when we come back to who we invite. So even though we’ve say in resources, we need a diversity of our industry involved, our risk said we could miss someone out. So it goes back to our resources, and it defines every single area that we need to include. Does that help?

– [Angela] Yes.

– Great, so it gets rid of the ambiguity when it comes to the resources, and puts it into more clarity for the sake of ensuring that you have a sustainable approach.

– [Angela] Thank you.

– Pleasure. Any other questions before I try to summarise in the six minutes? God, I can’t believe I rushed through it. Nope, okay, great. All right, fabulous. So let’s go back just refresh. Playbook, this is the most important part of any, any event plan. Because if you haven’t got the people that are signing the checks, being engaged, at the higher level in leadership of this event, on the same page, then everything else is at risk. Your Playbook and whatever you want to call it, I’ll call it a Playbook. I love Playbook. It sounds a lot more fun. We can actually set the scene for how that event is going to go on. Then we look at our event plan. We look at our experience, and remembering that the demography of your customers needs are not what they were in 2019. Now, I could have a whole banter on this with someone, but I can assure you that every single one of your customers is going to have a very different approach, and a very different need. So this is why I say this is the most crucial time for everyone to reassess, and have a look at what they offer as an experience. And I think it’s that the most expensive expression in the whole world is, “We’ve always done it that way.” That costs businesses. It costs organisations. It costs people a lot of money. So let’s move on from that, and look at today’s market, how we can develop something that is an experience to be remembered. And deliver on that well, using your resources in all those different areas. And don’t miss one out. There might not be anything in that line item just yet, maybe, but please do not consider it, because it’s a crucial element to the success of an event. And then match your risks, make sure they’re aligned, feed it back to the resources if you haven’t mitigated that risk. And then that can then flow on to a very nice little timeline that you can follow to deliver on your event.

– Lori, thank you so much, not just for giving us the hour, but to stay extra and answering questions you got but also for saying yes. to two more workshops.

– I can hear my PA by now going, “You did what?”

– That’s why I won’t spice it that way. Thanks everyone for staying with us. It’s very fabulous. And it’s so good to see someone wonderful familiar faces as well.

– See you guys. Thank you.