For any significant event you’re planning, whether it’s a corporate event, personal event or any other type, laying out a planning timeline is a vital consideration. Knowing when you need to have certain tasks completed by will help you keep the entire event planning process in order, ensuring you never fall behind or gloss over important details.
At In The Event, we’re proud to offer not only a wide variety of event rentals, but also event planning services for corporate events, digital events, holiday parties and numerous other event types throughout Utah. Why is an event planning timeline important, what are some basic themes for creating one, and how do you carry yours out effectively? This two-part blog series will go over everything you need to know.
Why Event Planning Timelines Are Important
Having a well-thought-out event planning timeline ensures that you’ll be able to remember and manage every step of your planning in the right order. Some of the specific benefits of maintaining a strong timeline include:
- Complete all required tasks on-time without leaving anything out
- Meet all event deadlines, including the date, start time and all pre- and post-event planning stages
- Identify potential problems so you can prevent them from showing up during the event
- Create a clear schedule of events for participants to follow throughout the day
- Effectively collaborate with contractors and other event planning professionals
- Provide all guests, employees or participants with the information they need to know about the event
- Make it easy for everyone involved to reference any task that needs completing at any given time
- Have enough time to incorporate any changes or additions that are necessary
These themes are important regardless of the size of your event, your budget or any other factors in play. Create an effective plan for how you’ll lay out the timeline and ensure all participants are on the same page, and you can prevent problems like forgetting to book vital equipment before it’s too late, not having time to rehearse important speeches before they’re delivered or just losing track of time.
Tips for Event Planning Timeline Creation
Here are some basic tips we offer clients on how to go about creating a timeline for their event planning:
- Add your anchor points first: This includes the start time, finish time and any pre-planned events, announcements or activities. When creating a timeline for your event planning needs, these are the items you want to have locked in first so that everything else can fall into place around them. If you have an existing date for when your event is taking place, use it as the anchor point to kick off your timeline.
- Vendor timelines: You must also consider the timelines of any external event planning professionals you’ve hired, including photographers, caterers, decorators and more. Make it a rule to always request a timeline from your vendors as soon as possible – this will help you stay organized and on-track with everything that needs to be completed.
- Schedule a buffer: While we all wish every event proceeded without a single delay, the reality is that unexpected events happen. To account for this, always add a buffer time to any activity or task you’ve scheduled in your planner. If moving an event forward by half an hour would require you to cut the cake sooner than expected, bump up the end time of your timeline to compensate.
In part two of our series, we’ll go over some timeline themes to hit based on the time remaining until your event. For more on how to lay out an event planning timeline, or to learn about any of our event rentals or event planning solutions in Utah, speak to the team at In The Event today.
