When you are an event planner, the Human Resources aspect is just as important as in any other profession. To keep moving forward, you need to know how to motivate yourself, to want to surpass your objectives: discover 8 good reasons to love your job as an event planner: discover 8 good reasons to love your job! There are different ways to do this, such as the annual performance review, which is the best way to define the objectives to be achieved in the coming period. But what about personal goals? On what indicators should we base ourselves and how can we set relevant and achievable objectives by being an event planner? After a long analysis of the market and how it works, we have prepared this short article to help you identify your personal objectives. So let’s do it!
THE ABILITY TO SET OBJECTIVES
Being able to set goals is essential to progress. Moreover, we do not necessarily notice it, but we do it on a daily basis. They can be quite harmless, such as trying to do sports 3 times a week, or more serious, such as buying a house before the age of 30. At work, it’s the same thing. You can try to have a production meeting every week or reduce the working time for a certain mission by 10 minutes. Anyway, you see the idea. 😉
Before setting goals, the first question to ask yourself is: will these goals impact me only or do they also include my team? This small difference is very important because the success of the objective does not depend only on you if you rely on your team.
THE SMART METHOD FOR SETTING OBJECTIVES
We already mentioned this in a previous article, but the SMART method is really the best way to set relevant objectives. SMART objectives are simple to define and above all very complete, once you have them clearly in mind, there is no need to rework them.
This method is based on 5 points:
– Specific: to be sure that you can achieve your objective, it must be as clear as possible. You must clearly have in mind what you want. Make your next event a success? Not precise enough. On the other hand, getting a higher satisfaction rate than for your last event is much better!
– Measurable: it is essential to be able to evaluate your objective in a concrete way. We then say that your objective is quantified. You must not only want to reduce the costs related to external service providers, you must specifically want to reduce the budget devoted to all types of service providers outside your company by 10%. You must then know the current amount to base yourself on a concrete notion.
– Achievable: to surpass yourself, you often want to set yourself objectives that are far too optimistic, but that’s when you make a first mistake. The risk is to get discouraged very quickly when you see that you will never be able to reach it. It is better to set a small challenge than a real obstacle that you will not be able to overcome.
– Realistic: in relation to the previous criterion, your objective must be realistic. We keep the idea of having a challenge to take up in order to keep a good dose of motivation, but we must not go beyond a certain unrealistic limit. Your objective must be challenging, motivating, ambitious but above all achievable.
– Timely defined: last but not least, you must define a time limit to achieve your objective. Give a concrete time element. We do not want “as soon as possible”, but “in 3 months”. As an event planner, you can also set a more concrete date in relation to the period of your future exhibition, for example.
Do you understand the method? It is relatively simple to implement. To help you a little more understand the method, a SMART objective could be:
“Increase market share by 30% on the Alpha range in participating pharmacies within 6 months of the conference.”
This objective is specific (increase market share), measurable (by 30%), achievable and realistic (comparison with the previous year’s results) and time-bound (within 6 months).
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SOME EXAMPLES OF INDICATORS TO BE USED
Now that you have understood how to set objectives, it is time to understand how to adapt them concretely to the event sector. To achieve this, what better way to get to the heart of the matter than by presenting certain indicators?
Improve awareness
– Increase the number of subscribers: you can look at the amount of contact requests that have been made on your website. Do you attend trade fairs? How many people stopped by your booth to get information? You can also use this opportunity to calculate your awareness ratio, i.e. the number of visitors who know you VS those who did not know you.
– Improve online visibility: you are probably active on social networks. Set yourself the goal of increasing the number of subscribers to your pages by implementing a new social media strategy, for example.
– Increase visitors to your website: it is now very easy to track the number of visitors to your website, but the Google Analytics interface is sometimes difficult to manage. If you have chosen to create one through Eventdrive, we have good news: it’s even easier! You will then know exactly how the number of visitors to your site has changed since your back Office Eventdrive.
Increase sales
– Increase turnover: you can directly tackle the big one and aim for an increase in turnover. To achieve this, you can try to sell more events, or less than in the previous period, but on a larger scale.
– Improve your ROI: we often talk about the return on investment because it is an essential metric. The better the feedback, the better for your company! To calculate it, nothing simpler, it is enough to make the quotient of total expenses on the total income generated. From there, you can get a good idea of the return on investment of your event.
Improve customer satisfaction
– Increase the Net Promoter Score: To assess your guests’ satisfaction, there is nothing better than using the Net Promoter Score. This metric allows you to easily know if your participants would be willing to recommend you on a scale of 1 to 10, and by analyzing the data collected, you can easily calculate the share of promoters and the share of detractors.
WHAT TYPES OF PERSONAL GOALS SHOULD BE SET?
In addition to more general goals, it is essential to be able to set personal goals that will push you to surpass yourself at your job. There are countless examples of personal objectives, which must be defined according to your skills, your areas of improvement, but also, why not, your personality. Do you need a personal challenge to motivate yourself? Setting ambitious objectives can be the solution. On the contrary. Do you work less well under pressure? Set yourself the goal of learning to decompress! In short, you have understood that the possibilities are many. But we have decided to give you some examples, to guide you, by giving you the different types of possible objectives:
Behavioural objectives
Soft skills, as they are called, deal particularly with the way you work, your integration into the team. For example, you can try to express yourself better in public, or learn to save your documents more regularly to avoid the disaster of losing all the work of a day (who hasn’t it already happened?). Behavioural goals can also be much more personal, such as improving spelling. Remember that taking training can help you achieve your goals as well.
Hard skills objectives
On the other hand, hard skills objectives require a little more involvement, we talk more about “demonstrable” skills. You can’t master the recently deployed management tool (this wouldn’t happen if you used Eventdrive ;-)) and this is a risk to your work? Do your best to achieve this and set a precise deadline. A hard skills objective can also be the learning of a new language or the development of a new skill.
Organizational objectives
Sometimes, putting a little order in the way you work doesn’t hurt. You can then try to automate certain tasks, or use tools that will organize your ideas, such as Trello or Asana for example.
Setting goals is not necessarily an easy thing to do, which is why it is important to have the right tools on hand. Our advice is to use the SMART method, as it seems to be the most complete, but you are free to use another technique. The goal is to set realistic and motivating objectives. We have presented you with the indicators that we think are the most important, but don’t forget that there are dozens more. Take them into consideration when defining your objectives. Find the ones that are most relevant to you and get started!
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