When planning an event, it is crucial to have your final program or event agenda determined early. A tough challenge in event planning is building a program that will satisfy the needs of all those in attendance and then sticking to it. You have to consider many key factors [...]

More often than not meetings and conferences are aimed at those who thrive in an environment full of people. There is loud music, audience and group interactions, and very little time to yourself. Basically, we plan our events for extraverted people. Not everyone is naturally extraverted and often our [...]

As event planners we are often responsible to create and solicit sponsorship packages as part of an event. Clients will often use the same package from year to year with few changes. Our article What to Include in Your Event Sponsorship Package, explains how to create a sponsorship package [...]

There are many urgent items that need to be completed in order to wrap up an event and it is important that you do not forget to acknowledge those who helped make the event a reality. Thank you letters should be sent to sponsors and exhibitors shortly after the [...]

Volunteers are the life-blood of most associations and are crucial to the overall success of the organization. What is their time worth? How do you assign value to association volunteers? Quantifying the Value of Association Volunteers Recently I attended the Canadian Society of Association Executives (CSAE) annual conference. One [...]

Sponsorships The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has a published a guide GST/HST Information for Non-Profit Organizations; however, its section on sponsorships does not offer clear-cut information about sales tax on sponsorships. As an association management company, we add GST/HST to all sponsorships sold by our association clients, except under [...]

As an event manager, we are contracted by an individual on behalf of an organization who we refer to as our client, but most of the time we really don’t just work with that one individual on the event. There are usually volunteer committees, board members and other staff [...]

Your organization or association needs the protection insurance offers, for all of its events, even if you believe “there is no way that we could be at fault.” There are several varieties of insurance – read on to find out which (and possibly all) are right for your event. [...]

Have you ever been in the situation where the funding you requested to host an event comes in at the final hour? Now what? How do you execute the planning of an event without sufficient advance notice? You know that your association would benefit significantly by creating an opportunity [...]

Event planners rely on great vendors to make the events we manage a success. We are typically highly organized, type A personalities and we expect our vendors to be as organized as we are. I am sure you have some horror stories about dealing with vendors that maybe weren’t [...]