Making a Bad Experience Better
What was one or your worst event experiences and how did you remedy it?
Melissa, Great way to solve a not so great problem. Keep up the great work.
Dr. Jean Norris
The event was an invite only VIP party for less than 1,000 attendees. The artist arrived and did not want to perform unless the venue was at capacity, therefore we had to explain to the client the situation, gain permission to invite others to the event. Both satisfying the artist and pleasing the clients expectations.
When we first tried to start advertising the school, we would attend various education fairs. The results were not that good at first. Since then we have hired a marketing/advertising individual that puts the word out through email, social media, and in some cases even phone calls. This has helped us dramatically and have not had a bad turnout since.
Again, it was an awesome idea. Keep up the good work!
Dr. Jean Norris
I agree it would have been better to have extras on hand which was my suggestion to the person in charge.
Edwina, It can be very stressful when situations like this arise. What did you do in this exact situation? Would having extras "just in case" also be a solution?
Dr. Jean Norris
One experience we recently had was at a graduation. A graduate who originally said she was not participating showed up leaving us without an extra nursing lamp and candle for the required ceremony for nurses as a part of the graduation. Although we are in charge of graduation, my team does not go to the venue at the same time so for situations like this the person at the venue can place a call back to the office for the another teammate to bring whatever may be missing or needed before the last team member leaves.
Giovanni,
Thank you for sharing your story! It happens to many. Great advice on researching the community calendar!
Dr. Jean Norris
Worst experience we've had at NPCollege was a "Back to School" event planned 2 years ago which coincided with the Hispanic Heritage opening ceremony and festivities in Los Angeles. Our number of attendees had a significant drop and unfortunately, there was not much we could do since important guests and vendors had already saved the same date. We learned a great lesson and now we research for significant events in the community prior to choosing a date for our events.
Josh, thanks for sharing your experience here. It sounds like you have used this experience to learn a little more about the city as well as how to promote your events in the future. I look forward to hearing about your next event and hope it is a success.
Dr. Jean Norris
Our worse event was a "Battle of the Bands" that we held here in Nashville to promote the recording school that I work at. First off, we did not do a good job of promoting the event locally. We put up fliers and tried to get the word out via Facebook and Twitter but it became clear once the events started that we should have used more traditional means of advertising as well. Another interesting thing we learned is that Nashville as a city gives a bad connotation to events titled "Battle of the Bands" because of the many events that use this term but end up being low quality. Had we done more research on events like ours we would have seen this. In the future we plan to improve by trying to go through the press to gain coverage for the event and also plan to use more traditional means of advertising.
Excellent thinking on your feet, Lola. Your experience speaks a great deal to the importance of being well-prepared and thinking of all possibilities in advance. With the help of technology, it sounds like you were able to avoid a negative experience.
A flight cancelation - and not being able to get a connection in time for the event. Since I was at the airport, I set up in the wifi zone and re-coordinated the event via my laptop and cell phone - the best tools ever made for event planning. Since I had prepared well in advance, I was able to quickly implement all changes. The well-attended event was successful.
