If you have ever been in touch with the event planning industry at any point in your career, you know how stressful it can get.
For those who do not know, let me paint you a picture: the evening before the event, you’re sitting in a half-assembled booth, surrounded by carton boxes, and people are pinging you left and right, online and offline, for answers and instructions. You’re missing your coffee cup delivery for tomorrow morning; Amazon orders are not yet shipped; you’re missing power outlets for activities you’re not even sure you will do…
And that’s why, according to a study by the World Scholarship Vault, event planning is the third-most stressful job in the world in 2023.
The following blog post is meant to serve as a mini guide for DevRel personnel of any seniority and anyone who needs help planning and executing events.
Before an event
Good preparation is key! There are several things you can do to help your event manager organize people before the event even starts.
The first thing would be to curate a list of the events you want to participate in before the event season even starts. This is the opportunity to list all the events you would like to participate in, whether as a developer or a DevRel person.
It’s also important to take part in the creative process while considering how your company should be represented at a particular event. You can give examples of cool goodies you’ve seen at other conferences; you can brainstorm new merch designs or figure out how to best present your brand at the booth.
The last thing you should do before departing for your event is to write a thorough brief! A good brief can be a brilliant source of knowledge for your booth staff, especially if other teams or departments join you. Consider including the following points in your brief:
- timing and staff schedules
- social events schedules
- booth logistics and activations
- specific event insights (if you’ve attended the event before or know some extra info that may be useful to others)
- FAQs that tend to be asked during booth duty by typical booth attendee.
During an event
Event managers usually come in early, do the heavy lifting, and check everything off of their checklist. If you can, join your event manager when setting up and dismantling the booth. If any last-minute problems arise, you can solve them as a team. This way, you’d most definitely be more efficient and faster than if you left a sole event manager stuck in a half-finished booth.
Don’t forget to have a demo of your technology. Practice how you want to demonstrate it and have a plan B if the demo fails – because if anything in life is sure, it’s that tech will fail you at some point.
When visitors approach the booth, don’t just pitch your company to them, have a conversation. Listen actively to their problems. Your technology may help them solve it, but that’s not even the most important part. You want to get to know the developers visiting your booth so you can then create the best developer experience possible based on the knowledge of real people as opposed to a statistical, hence imaginary, for the most part, audience.
After an event
It is very important how you wrap up an event. And it doesn’t just end with you taping up the last box of conference items.
After an event ends, you should make collaterals! If the conference offers you an opportunity to do an interview – take it! Communicate with your audience via social media and post about your booth engagements and giveaways. Write about your conference experiences in a blog post and share it with your community.
This lets you stay in touch with people you’ve met and the community you’re building. They can all be your future audience, users, and even champions!
Last but not least, use the statistics gathered after an event and the lessons learned to prepare for the next event even better than before. Don’t just store it in your brain, share it with your team, so they are aware of success but also aware of all the shortcomings encountered and how you’re planning to overcome them.
I gave a broader lecture on How to make your event manager love you at this year’s DevRelCon London. You can check out the slide deck, and the video of the talk is uploaded on the official conference pages.
