Sometimes Event Organisers Just Have to Muck In

Despite your best laid plans if you're an event organiser you should always expect the unexpected. At least you should be planning as far as possible for the unknown and make allowances in your schedules for extra time and resources. As an event organiser you are likely to be the one whose shoulders this falls on.

For a music festival or event ensure your schedules and calendars build in buffers for late running or the ability to move artists and sound checks around. Communicate schedules to all concerned and double check this is fully understood. If you have equipment booked and it fails to turn up do you have a back-up plan with a reserve supplier or does the venue have equipment that can be used and has it been tested?

Here are a few examples of stories from various event organisers that may or may not be true: 

• There is a story of an artist arriving for their sound check and asking the event organiser to entertain their 14-year-old child for an hour. The same artist then demanded that 12 very specific bottles of wine were in his dressing room chilled and ready for the moment they completed their set, a quick trip to the local supermarket in rush hour was required to procure said bottles of wine, which incidentally were not touched by the artist concerned.

• Then there was the artist on tour who refused to let the arranged transport to carry his precious instruments from one venue to the next and insisted that the event organiser transport them himself, the artist then called every 20 minutes to check his instruments were ok.

• The artist who would only do their sound check with their own sound engineer who had disappeared, the organiser had to hunt down said engineer who was found nursing a hangover from the night before and rapidly bring him to his senses.

• An events organiser who delegated a seating plan and audience numbers to a member of staff who couldn’t count and 5 minutes before the event was due to start, with customers waiting to enter, realised they were 50 seats short. The organiser then had to man handle 50 heavy chairs into an auditorium in record time.
  

So you see, being an event organiser is not all glitter and glam, you have to be prepared to perform any role and 'muck in' with just about anything including the unexpected. As an event organiser the responsibility ends with you and in many cases you are performing multiple roles from artist liaison to marshaling or even acting as a runner.

If you are using an event management software solution like FestivalPro you will get all the functionality you need to plan and manage your event. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience. The easy to use FestivalPro platform contains flexible calendarised functionality that enables you to make changes in the fly with automated notifications to key people.

Photo by Thibault Trillet from Pexels

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