🥂 Events' organization: what i learnt ✨

This is going to be my board diary as an event organizer
It will feature a lot of "takehomes" by the end of the party

📖 The journey ✈️

The journey stars on sept. 24 2024 when my group of friends and I decided to host a night party on the 12/31 to celebrate the new year's eve togheter;
As a result of it we decided to make it big, very big : so we started planning something like a 200ish people party.
To be completely fair, we've alredy hosted few other parties during the last 2-3 years but the most recent one was on aug. 15 2024 with around 35 participants. What we can clearly see is that the number of people to that party was around 1/6 of what we planned for the next one.

On sept. 26 2024 we had our first call with the property manager of the location we decided to be hosting the party in - we will call it "Mauro" from now on - which was very vague about the property availability for that day: he said he had alredy took contacts with few other guys with our same idea, so he let us with a simple "we will update in the near future"; In the meanwhile we contacted a lot, I mean a lot, of other properties mangers seeking for a location that could be either very roomy and at the same time quite cheap: Villas weren't even a thing. Later on we discovered that many Villas' managers, beside the price being out of our budget, they don't like hosting night parties inside their properties.
TL;DR: I can probably see a reason why they do that, I'm not complaining about it. I want to state here that we clearly let everyone know our plan and our vision that I'm briefly going to mention now:

1. The event MUST be 18+ only;
2. The event was going to be either "free drink" or "free drink*" - I'm going to explain it later;
3. Partecipants' safety was going to be our priority: we alredy tought about "renting" 2 to 4 bodyguard for the event;
4. Profits weren't our goal, we just wanted to be THE party of that day;

To my surprise, even having explained our plan no one was going to let us host the party in their properties.

We where then back to starting point, we just had to wait for Mauro's reply.

Fast forward to monday nov. 4 2024
After some unreplied text messages we finally heard Mauro's back through a phone call: he was going to let us rent his property for our party; I'm not going to bother the reader with unnecessary details but I want just to say that we were very hyped for that news.

In the next few days we had 3 group meetings to discuss main topics like:

1. Whether it was going to be a "free drink" or a "free drink*" party
2. How were we going to book people in and how should they be paying us (and the pricing);
3. The amount of staff members we needed
4. How we should sponsor the party

"Free drink*" is referring to an idea we had, that I still support today, about the drink distribution at the party: we thought of giving 4 free drinks included with the party ticket, the extra drinks were sold in pair (using chips as a ticket for the drinks) for very very low price; I still think that it was a great idea because of some technical organiation features that made it completely worth it:

1. "Drunkness limit": we could limit the abuse of alchool because people were discouraged in buying a lot of extra drinks
2. Drink control: we could estimate the quantity of drinks that we are going to produce
3. Extra profits
4. Cheaper event ticket pricing: we could lower the ticket price to attract more people but still stay within the budget by selling drinks' chips

It has some downsides but I still believe it was a great idea;

Fast forward again to tuesday nov. 19 2024
The release day has finally come, and let me say it was overwhelmingly good, but - as a software developer - I like to talk about pure data: 31% of the partecipants target has been reached in the first 24 hours.
31% on the first day is well over a quarter of target 42 day prior to the event date is just crazy;
just shy of 30% of the budget target have been reached;
male/female% target was just above the target;

I want to take this part of the blog to thank everyone who helped us spreading our Instagram content over their profiles, - data again - around 30 people reposted our Instagram story and this was a great audience boost:
at this point of the story we had just 100 followers on the event account but our stories reached over 4500 people, that's crazy too.

💡 Takehomes 🧠

1. Being immeasurably organised is the key: having everything - I mean EVERYTHING - planned is the way to go. I can see why many people don't do this often, it requires a lot of effort and planification skills but it will help during the process for sure and gives everyone a deadline for everything needed: it gives motivation and that sense of responability;

2. Love what you're doing: it has always been my life mantra but this was the right occasion to prove it right; you don't necessarily need to be good at what you're doing - I had no accademical knowledge on this field - but consistency and passion always pays off. Being consistent I would say is a foundamental part of any passion. Coming up everyday with new ideas, being proactive and use your free time to develop the project are parts of the passion too. Might sounds crazy but periodically refreshing the partecipants spredsheet is what kept me full focused over it - maybe it was just because everything was working fine -.