My son is learning how to play the piano. His teacher reminds him weekly that he has to practice the same movements over and over again to strengthen his finger muscles and to subconsciously memorize the position of his fingers. After much practice, his fingers will fly over the keys with confidence. We call this developing “muscle memory” and I use the idea to describe what I want you to achieve with your event productions, or other products you produce regularly.

I produced 50-60 events per year at The Texas Tribune, including The Texas Tribune Festival (get your tix now!) between myself and one direct report. How? By templatizing the Tribune’s event formats and production protocols. We might call these standard operating procedures (SOPs) or playbooks but whatever you call it, the idea is a standard task list, production schedule and team workflow that has been executed enough times to reduce any friction in the process, allowing the team to move easily through the necessary steps to accomplish the production.

While there are 8 formats on this slide, they are actually variants of 4 main formats. The variations were tweaks of well-used formats that served specific purposes. Let’s break down the “OG” Trib event template — the free morning conversation — as an example of why templates are important to your event strategy.

The morning conversation 🌅

Nearly half of our annual productions were morning conversations in the Tribune’s home-base of Austin, TX. This format was developed before I landed at the Tribune in 2012 and it continues on with variations today.

The Tribune partnered with a topically-relevant venue, political-types like to hang out there, which happened to be across the street from our offices. On Thursday mornings, I would trek to the office at 6:30am, grab our materials and head over to the venue with my cart. I would prepare the room and folks would start arriving around 7:30am. They would grab coffee and chat while the room filled up. At 8am, we began the program, which was usually Evan Smith interviewing one to three lawmakers about legislative topics. The interview ended promptly at 9am and audience dispersed back to their offices for the start of the workday.

We used Basecamp to manage our teams and tasks so when we confirmed a speaker and an event date, I copied the task list template, added due dates and assigned tasks. Because we’d done this before, no explanation needed. Everyone knew what they needed to execute and by when. We had templatized artwork with known production timelines. Our relationship with the venue required minimal touch points for confirming details. I sent reminders to our on-site team to set their alarms. Wash, rinse, repeat. Muscle memory.

The benefits of an event template 📒

From this outline, you can see that producing these 25-30 events per year didn’t require burdensome hours of staff time, but the template was also a boon for our audience. These conversations averaged 100 attendees, about 25% were “regulars,” i.e. those that attended regularly no matter who was speaking, and the balance with a topical interest in the speaker, e.g. education, healthcare, legislative forecasting or discussion of hot-button topics in the news. Even if they only attended when it was topically relevant, I saw the same loyal faces year after year. Our audiences developed muscle memory for attending these conversations.

We usually hosted a membership table so folks could sign up or renew on the spot. Sometimes we had swag to give away during a drive, and whoever was there on behalf of membership would chat up attendees, contributing to our welcoming space. The data showed that members who attended an event were more likely to renew, and when we emailed people asking them to become members after an event, the join rate was high. We had a good showing of members at our events and events helped drive membership sales.

Regarding corporate revenue, potential sponsors knew what to expect, reducing the time and effort in selling sponsorships. Some sponsors supported the entire series, others came on board to support specific conversations. Through ongoing consultative selling, the chief revenue officer April Hinkle knew what her clients would want to support. When an event was added to the schedule that might interest them, she quickly sent out proposals. Clients had likely attended this series at one point or another, they had relevant proposals in their hands so they could make quick decisions. Muscle memory.

Have I sold you on the idea of an templatized event format yet? I’ve included some additional articles below about other organizations that may inspire you on how this could benefit your organization.

Developing your template 📓

Now for the challenge, the hard bit. Too many teams get hung up at this early stage. If the process I outlined above was 20 hours of total staff time, and that was maximized, streamlined and rote, how do you get from not doing events to developing a format that works to event ninja?

Research and development is the up-front investment you make for any product and events are no different. You will spend time and money designing and testing to get to the template stage, but the end game as outlined above, is why you should stick with it. Consider getting inspired by researching what other news organizations are doing. Most have past videos to watch; take notes on what works and doesn’t.

Because events are a team sport, include everyone who will be involved in production in the R&D process. What do they like? What would they add that is unique to your community or organization? Come up with an event format and then test to optimize it and streamline the workflow. Once you get to the final template, you’ll be amortizing the investment by reaping benefits from creating something that works for your organization’s audience and team. Use this Event Plan Guide to facilitate team discussion.

If you don’t have a compelling program, it won’t matter what else you do.

🛠️ Testing and failing

I encourage you to develop low cost events and to deliver them multiple times to streamline delivery, maximize staff time and find the sweet spot for your audience. Testing allows team members who will be responsible for execution to weigh in on how best to fit it into their workflow. After some number of repetitions, you’ll have a task list, event run of show, budget and post-event strategies incorporated into your workflows, project management tools and yes, muscle memory. You’ll also be able to tweak the standard format into off-shoots like I did in the slides above so you aren’t developing whole new events. Doing one-offs is a sure-fire way to spend way more time on events than is likely advisable and will be frustrating for your team.

As for failure, you aren’t likely to fail Fyre Fest-style so don’t sweat it. The things that don’t go as expected or don’t land the way you had hoped or unexpected things that wind up being really cool, all are learning moments. As Jay Allred of Richland Source says, don’t expect A+ work; shoot for a solid B then take what you learn and apply it to the next version. I can assure you that dealing with unhappy attendees isn’t as bad as you think. Smile and thank them for attending and providing feedback, and promise to do better next time. That’s usually all that is needed to settle ruffled feathers.

There is a deep sense of satisfaction that comes from bringing your community together. I always felt accomplished when I spent my Thursday mornings providing space for civic conversation, all before the work day started. You’ll be hooked!

🤠 Supporting Articles

Here are some experiences from other organizations that reinforce my point. Have some war stories to share? Drop me a line!

• How Radio Ambulante has made community building routine by Ariel Zirulnick, The Membership Guide
• After Hours: Reflecting on this zany, live music, newsroom concert series by Dillon Carr, Richland Source
• How Scalawag is using events to diversify audience and grow membership by Cierra Hinton and Alysia Harris, Better News
• Designing Effective Community Events, World Bank Collaboration for Development

Thanks for giving this a read. If you found it helpful, share with your team!

P.S. AI in action: I used YESEO to generate a headline for this post. One of the suggestions was “How Templating Texas Tribune Events Streamlined Production: Insider Tips,” which I liked but tweaked into the headline and subhead you see. What think? 😉 iykyk