Planning a workshop in Strategic & Affordable ways

Planning a workshop isn’t as easy as it sounds but definitely can be made with a little bit of planning and strategies. In terms of professional growth, workshops can be beneficial for the growth, of organizations. “Bigger success with minimal efforts”, workshops and training can strengthen the relationship between the owner and client. It’s a way to make your idea reach out to clients and customers. 

Additional features like hosting a parallel event, and live sessions for taking up queries can increase client interaction. Furthermore, at times it’s difficult to engage people online in the same manner as offline, to keep this intact you can ask participants for suggestions or road map they would like to follow making the session interactive.

Description: Workshops encourage participants to engage themselves with new ideas and contribute to the growth of the organization. Moreover, it is an opportunity for learners to participate and gain some hands-on experiences to improve their skills.

It’s equally crucial for you to have the correct planning abilities as an event organizer. If you’re passionate about event planning, you might think about getting an event planning certification to boost your resume.

Know Essentials of Planning a Workshop

1. Goal

Analysis of the motive of the workshop by tracking down the outcomes of the workshop. Learn to fulfill all the needs to achieve those outcomes while planning a workshop. The process of creating a successful workshop is to set your OKRs i.e objective and key results.

2. Audience

Know your target audience and based on that include activities in the room to keep attendees engaged. Leave traditional workshop learning style rather than try to make it more of an interactive session. This way your audience will not lose interest in the event even if it is a time-consuming workshop. Learners are present in the space because they want to take the value of the workshop for their growth.

3. Location (virtual and offline) 

Offline Mode: If hosting a workshop offline lookout for venues that aren’t far away, and your attendees could reach you. Also, consider the number of workshop participants while selecting a venue. However, if a number of audiences are large make sure your voice and videos are reachable to everyone. For fewer audiences conference room would work well.

Online Mode: Don’t let your workshop planning dull if hosting it virtually. Planning a workshop virtually gives you a free hand to collaborate with larger groups all over the world without limitations. In addition, participants from distances may wish to attend these workshops and have benefits from them.

Things to consider:

• While organizing the online workshop, make sure you are using a ticketing platform that provides the ticketing amount directly into your account
• The online ticketing system should accept payments through different currencies. Registration software should be user-friendly.
• The virtual event hosting platform should be tested before the event.
• Pre-event engagement activities can help to generate excitement for our event.

4. Sponsorship

Reach out to organizations with similar goals increase the chances of getting sponsorship. Sponsors see this as an opportunity to market themselves, make sure you have an appealing business proposal ready with you before approaching the potential sponsors. Get your hands on tips about how to find sponsors for the event.

5. Timeline

Keep the time in mind your presentation or lectures shouldn’t go so long that it may become hard for the audience to take it up. Include breaks in between along with physical activities related to workshop learning. There is a thin line between an informatic workshop and a boring workshop. So, balance your time such that it should be helpful according to participants’ needs at the end of the workshop.

6. Promotion

It’s been observed that around 38% of internet users use social media for searching online events to participate in. Here’s where the promotion of events plays a vital role in increasing engagement. Promotion is important to stay ahead of your competitors and also to increase your reach.

7. Feedback

An important exercise towards the end of the workshop or after the ending. It can help you know where things went wrong, and what more could be added that got missed out. Moreover, timely feedback can be constructive for the next workshop planning and organizers can host a workshop considering those points.

Many organizers use positive feedback as a testimonial on their event page which is the best practice to use feedback as a testimonial

Have a look at this best practice of using feedback as a testimonial.

How to Start Workshop Planning

1. Setting up goals & OKR

Setting up a goal is a crucial step while planning a workshop so prepare well, as it makes the objective and whole together with the path of the workshop more directed. Get ground rules cleared before inviting participants to the workshop. Ask questions like what a successful workshop looks like? And let views and ideas of your team group on this be in. Never deviate from the agenda of the workshop.

– Arrange a meeting for group discussion and discuss points to make the workshop interactive.

– Create a rough sketch of the workshop plan before jumping into detailed planning.

– Set an objective of the workshop and look into its outcomes.

– Let team group put their thoughts into the planning, taking up positive views.

– Mark the deadline for the completion of each section of your event plan.

– Research the topic of the workshop before you are running a workshop.

2. How to Reach the Target Audience:

The target audience may vary from workshop to workshop. It depends on what you are trying to sell to your attendees as part of learning or training.

Here is the checklist of where you should distribute your workshop ideally:

• Event discovery platforms:

Event discovery platforms where millions of people discover events and book tickets are the right places to post your workshop. AllEvents is used by 10M+ event seekers to discover events.

• Social media platforms:

Social media platforms are the places where most people spend their time. Hence, promoting events on social media has become a necessity.

Apart from that, you can create paid ads on Facebook and Instagram.

• Search engine:

Whenever anyone from your target audience is looking for a workshop to attend, they should reach out on your event page. Posting events on an event platform with SEO-optimized pages and a high domain score is the easiest way to do this.

3. How to Manage Budget

Create a rough estimate of your workshop budget before workshop planning. Pen down the list of items along with their cost, and include every smallest possible item you may need while you running a workshop. If you have hosted a workshop in past even that can provide you with a bunch of information regarding your workshop budget.

– Try gathering as much information about your attendees as you can, that will help you decide your ticket price and will also make it easy to search for sponsored money amounts. Last-minute tickets sell can be hectic but not if planned well.

– Make a list of the expenses you are expecting during a workshop plan.

– Study the past workshop plan experience thoroughly.

– Make a borderline for spending money and make sure you save some amount from it for last-minute else cases.

– Try to cover the maximum part of your workshop with the sponsored money.

4. How to engage participants

Getting participants involved in the workshop is a crucial part of creating successful workshops. Plan activities that will help mix up attendees with each other. Ask for participants’ opinions where you feel like so that instead of being a boring workshop plan, it is an intersecting one. Opt for different learning styles so that it can be a gripping session for all the participants. 

– Start with sharing your personal experience with the attendees about the workshop topic.

– Create events on LinkedIn as it is a professional platform. It’s simple to recruit professionals for events like workshops, and LinkedIn may be the best option.

– Plan some group activities for participants so that they can relax a bit.

– Organise 5 minutes ask questions around at the end of each session, and keep the session small enough to grasp.

– You can keep rewards for participants for games organized between the session.

Find coolest workshop engagement ideas →

5. Follow Up -end of the workshop

To understand where you went wrong a post-workshop plan must be taken care of. Above all, it will help you know the positive and negative points of your workshop plan. And hence, next time you can make a better comeback, it is all part of self-learning towards conducting successful workshops. Implement suggested views in your next workshop plan.

– Follow-up emails can be sent across, to know participants’ views on the workshop. AllEvents provides a feature of automated follow-up emails. Publish your events and explore automation tools.

– Keep a problem-solver approach while going through the received feedback.

– Give your best in reaching up to the expectations of participants and make yourself ready to conduct a better workshop than the previous one.

Most people think workshops are boring and they aren’t wrong. Their experience holds about workshops beings boring lecture classes. But changing your workshop plan style with the time will only take growth higher.

There shouldn’t be any pressure on you while planning a workshop so you better be relaxed and cool-minded before starting your work. More than an organizer think like an attendee, this will make your job easier to plan.

Additional Plans to make Successful Workshop

Activities

Make participants indulge in a few activities such as games, short conversations, and asking for opinions that will be an ice-breaker for the attendees. For example, games that can be introduced during the session like stone-paper-scissor, finger fight, drawing fun stickers, etc, and many more if explored.

• Take care of time duration during these activities a lot of time shouldn’t be wasted here.
• The use of virtual reality tools can be interesting as many companies are taking up these event management tools to increase engagement.

Propagate Workshop

By now you already know promotion of the event is very important not just with the aspects of the workshop but also to get your event sponsorship. Make catchy content in the workshop description because that is the first thing participants will judge you on and mark points. Make content visually attractive, by adding pictures or videos to your workshop description.

• Create appealing landing pages to promote the workshop to a larger audience.
• Use offer as a strategy by giving early participants discount offers.

Collaboration

Communication is the key whether it’s an online workshop or offline. It’s just an online workshop that provides more opportunities to collaborate as it can be done on a worldwide basis. And different software available in the market is making it effortlessly easier to have a larger audience.

Collaborating with different groups creates new ideas that can be implemented while planning a workshop. Collaboration with just one person may not make sense and be helpful to your event.

• At times unnecessary meetings can be discouraging.
• Try to keep things short and simple. And focus on the agenda of the workshop.

Manage team

If you feel everyone’s opinion is equally important on how to plan a workshop, then let your team groups know this. No one should feel left out while you are working as a team. Do a regular group huddle, that will improve your work efficiency and you can keep a better track of the work being done.

In conclusion, keep small targets for the groups of the team, making stair next steps for reaching the goal. It makes sense that the whole team is responsible for the whole workshop plan and not just one person.

• Create achievable milestones and not some imaginary ones. Discussion about reaching these milestones.
• Appreciation of work can boost the confidence of smaller groups and encourage them to do better.

These tips may help you boost your event business. Start planning your workshops.