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What is your event strategy?

If you don't have a map to your destination, you might not get there.

Agnes Varnum

24 Apr 2024 — 3 min read

Are you a media organization producing events? Exploring an event plan? If so, please take this survey. I've heard time and again that events are a big challenge for various reasons, and I'm working on a new project to make it easier.

A woman entering a dense forest as a metaphor for developing an event strategy

In my first post, I noted five questions I ask when talking to news organizations about their event plans, and after having this discussion, they don’t always call me back. It’s overwhelming to think about a big hairy challenge, but understanding what you want to get out of your events is essential to avoid wasted time and money, and an unclear return on your investment (ROI). We do this kind of planning with all kinds of products so hopefully this isn’t news, but given what I’ve heard, it bears repeating.

“If you've seen one nonprofit news organization, you've seen one nonprofit news organization.” —Evan Smith in Second Rough Draft

In the spring of 2020 as the deputy director of RevLab at The Texas Tribune, I poured out my experience into Events Bootcamp, a eight-week learning/coached program designed to help organizations develop a plan and execute an event production. We delivered the course that summer to 14 teams, and repeated the effort the following summer with another 22 teams.

From both cohorts there are still many that are still doing events, so over the coming weeks, I’ll be checking in with them to report on how things have gone. I’ll also be repackaging the learnings from the bootcamp to help organizations looking to build their own plans.

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Getting started 🏁

The first step to developing a plan is to brainstorm with your team. While it’s tempting to go scour the web looking for a template, because your organization is unique, so must be your event plan. Don’t have time for all that work? How do I say this nicely? If you don’t have time to make a plan, you don’t have time for an event program. I can absolutely help you get into a groove so production is not so difficult in the long run — with a small team, I produced 50-60 events per year while at The Texas Tribune — but jumping in without consideration is likely to result in frustration.

Assuming you are still with me, the American Press Institute offers a great event planning strategy worksheet along with “The best strategies for generating revenue through events” by Kevin Loker (pub. Aug. 7, 2014). The examples in the article are outdated but the advice still holds, and the strategy worksheet is a solid guide to help your team in generating ideas that will be organic for your organization. The best events are rooted in an understanding of your audience and what will resonate with them, and what you can bring to the table vs. what you need to source elsewhere.

Do you feel confident about your WHO and WHY and are aiming for one large event or series? Check out my Event Planning Worksheet. This also requires a brainstorm focused on teasing out all of the avenues your team will pursue to make your event a success. The worksheet can evolve into your Event Brief, a one-sheet that is shared and explains all of the details of what is happening, who is participating, and those all-important goals that will be your yardstick for ROI at the end of the production.

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A word on event types

I’m focused on what I call editorial events. At The Texas Tribune, we didn’t have bandwidth for projects that didn’t serve the mission. Not every event was newsroom-driven — we had trivia nights, happy hours and fundraisers — but even when the primary purpose wasn’t live journalism, we still featured our journalists, topics of coverage and audience interests in the mix. I’m sure future posts will allude to different kinds of events, but for clarity’s sake, my perspective is primarily on events driven by the newsroom. We’ll get into this more as we go, and you are welcome to send me your questions and topics you’d like to see discussed in this space.