10 Not-So-Obvious Items for Your Event Bag

If you plan and manage special events, you have an event bag.  The bag (usually an old briefcase or gym bag) contains extra items that might come in handy for any event, on top of all the supplies you are already packing.  So while you will already have pens for the registration desk, your event bag will contain an extra box of pens for when the ones you have go missing, which they will.  A well-stocked event bag usually contains typical office equipment such as scissors, a stapler, Sharpies, name tag holders, string, tape (of the duct, masking and double-sided variety), thumb tacks, pushpins, paper, USB sticks, and the like.

The event bag needs to be checked and inventoried before each event and in a perfect world, it would be restocked immediately after every event but, as any event planner will tell you, restocking the bag is usually the last thing anyone wants to do in the exhausted hours immediately following an event so it gets tossed into a corner where it remains until it's opened hours before the next event.

If you regularly plan events you know all the staples you need for your kit but there are many more, not-so-obvious items you may want to include.  Following is my list of the top ten must-haves for your event bag, based on two decades of managing (mostly) successful events.

1. Plastic ties (see photo above) - At every event, there is something that needs to be secured, fastened or otherwise jury-rigged onto a pole.  When that happens, nothing beats plastic industrial ties.  They adjust to any size and you can just snip off any extra length with scissors.

2. Eye drops - Spectacular events don't happen overnight.  A seamless execution is the result of months of careful planning and last minute changes.  It is very rare to get a good night's sleep before an event, usually because you are still at the venue hanging banners at midnight.  To ensure you look fresh and awake at event time, always carry different varieties of eye drops.

3. Adhesive bandages - All that last minute lifting, hanging, shoving, cleaning wreaks havoc on your fingers and minor cuts and scrapes are the inevitable result.  Having these on hand will prevent you from dripping blood onto your beautiful rented table-cloths.

4. Chargers - Of course your cell phone is dead.  You were up all night trying to find a florist who could deliver 1000 purple lilies by morning since the florist you already booked fell ill.  Your event kit should include every type of wall charger available for today's array of smart phones, cameras, music players, etc.

5. Flashlight - Have you ever crawled under a stage trying to figure out why your PowerPoint presentation isn't working or your exploding confetti gizmo has malfunctioned?  It's a lot easier when you can see where you're going.

6. Sewing kit - I have never staged an event in 20 years where we didn't need to pull out the sewing kit. Dropped hems, popped buttons and inappropriate cleavage present themselves in the moments before the lights go up.

7. Stain remover - It's hard not to spill coffee on your shirt when you're quaffing gulps between table setups. A dab of stain remover may not hide it entirely but it will at least diffuse it over a larger area so it fades. If you have a car, bring along an extra blazer as well.

8. Flat shoes - Every seasoned (female) event planner knows that you wear flat shoes during set-up and put on the heels when it's event time.  Nowadays you can buy ballet flats that role up into a ball and come with their own carrying case.

9. Snacks - It's time for the event and you realize you've been onsite since 6 a.m. and haven't had a thing to eat.  When there's no time to nibble (and there never is), you can hit up your event bag for granola bars, protein bars, chocolate, etc. If you're super organized, you can include a small cooler with cheese strings and other items.

10. OTC medicine - Don't let your great work be sidelined by migraines, indigestion or nausea.  A well-stocked event bag can double as a portable medicine chest.

Those are just a few of the not-so-obvious essentials I make sure to include.  What are some other surprising things you pack for events?

You're never too senior to carry boxes in PR

 Your first job promotion is a mixed blessing.  When you hear the news that you're moving up the ladder, you feel great.  You've proven yourself worthy of more responsibility, you have a more important-sounding title and hopefully, a pay increase. But the initial elation wears off when you realize that colleagues who were friends last week now report to you, HR has been added to your job description and you don't actually get to ditch all the things you disliked about your former role.  In fact, a promotion often means you will do your former job, as well as a new one.

In 20 years experiencing my own, often stumbling, movements through the management ranks and witnessing the behaviour of my own team members once they've been promoted, I've noticed one constant - delegation is not what it's cracked up to be.  In fact, it's much less fun than anyone ever imagines.

While a junior role requires you to draft a news release and submit it for review, your shiny new senior role has a lot more steps.  You have to receive the assignment from your manager, choose a team member to handle it, meet with them to discuss it, set expectations and deadlines, follow up if the deadline is looming and you haven't seen anything, review the draft, meet with the staff member to share your feedback and provide suggestions for improvement, set another deadline for the revised draft, and then go through the process all over again.  And when you do finally have a workable document, you must resist the urge to rewrite the whole thing and accept that just because it's not "the way you would do it" doesn't mean it isn't good quality.  

In a management role, even if you only have one direct report, this scenario repeats itself all day everyday and due to the frantic, often last-minute nature of public relations, many assignments don't have the luxury of time for training and mentorship so you do them yourself anyway and at events, you'll often find yourself carrying boxes, fetching water for speakers, tracking down A/V people and other tasks you thought you had left behind when you were promoted. No such luck.

When I finally became a vice president at a PR agency, I thought, "This is it.  I've arrived.  No more schlepping boxes for me."  Only, it didn't work out that way.  While there was certainly a delineation between my role, the most junior person in the office, and everyone in between, I still found myself carrying boxes of press kits, straightening signage, picking up lunch for demanding celebrity spokespersons and, on one occasion, doing a midnight Wal-Mart run because, after setting up for an early morning event, a client was unsatisfied with the particular shade of purple on the tablecloths. I could have delegated the task but I was the only person who owned a car, I lived closest to the store and my staff, who had been on their feet for 18 hours, were exhausted.  It was not the time for a power play.

When I kvetched about this to a mentor of mine who is president of a large global agency based in Atlanta, he said, "You have to realize that, in PR, no matter how high up the chain you are, you will never stop carrying boxes."  While I was immediately gratified to find out I wasn't alone, I was distressed to realize that if even he was admitting this, then it must be true.

He went on to explain that while everyone in an agency has a different role and each step involves the shedding of old duties and the responsibility for new ones, everyone on a team is responsible for the final product whether it's a perfectly executed communications plan, a spectacular launch event or successfully shepherding the organization through a crisis.  He also reminded me that event management is a big part of PR agency life and no matter how far ahead you plan and how many times you confirm the details, things will go wrong.  Speakers cancel, planes are delayed, product is stopped at the border, A/V systems malfunction, taxi drivers get lost, flowers wilt, employees get ill, there aren't enough coat hangers, client approval is late, and so on.  But the show must go on and at that point, it's all hands on deck to make it happen. While someone has to take charge and direct traffic, there's no reason that person can't also carry boxes, if that's what's required to make it happen.  

In his book, The 48 Laws of Power, which I recommend as a fascinating insight into how people operate, author Robert Greene suggests that to attain true power, you must "Keep Your Hands Clean" and avoid doing the dirty work.  He would suggest that, at a big business event, the true leader arrives at the last minute looking fresh and professional wearing a clean suit and carrying nothing.  This will set him or her apart from the "workers" who have only a few minutes to wipe the dust off their clothes, throw on their event shoes, slick on some lip gloss and squirt Visine into tired eyes before the lights go up.  

I'm sure Greene would disagree with my mentor's assertion that you'll always carry boxes in PR, at least in the sense of establishing your credibility as a powerful leader.  Others leadership gurus would say you need to roll up your sleeves to gain the support of your team. 

What do you think about carrying boxes?  Good or bad leadership strategy?

How to Screw Up A Vaccination Campaign in 12 Easy Steps

After months of conjecture and baffling discourse, H1N1 panic has gripped the North American population. And our governments have started rolling out an official innoculation campaign. To say that this campaign, and the clinics that kickstarted it, got off to a bumpy start is a gross understatement. Unmitigated disaster would be a more appropriate way to describe the chaos that characterized the first few days of Toronto's vaccination efforts, brought to you by the good people at Toronto Public Health. Note: I'm referring here to the management who organized the clinics, not the nurses and security guards who have been run off their feet and by all accounts, remained cheerful in the face of adversity.

As a PR agency, we produce an average of ten to twelve events per year. These range from intimate dinners for 20 to public events where we expect hundreds. Although every event is unique, the steps involved in pulling off a seemingly flawless event (there's no such thing as a truly flawless one) are the same and involve a lot of people working behind the scenes against a detailed critical path to ensure success. And, although granted, we're not trying to vaccinate a paranoid public, we face our share of setbacks - caterers who lose our paperwork, hotels which double-book our rooms, guest speakers who cancel at the last minute...well you get the idea. That's what contingency planning is for.

In observing how Toronto Public Health has executed the H1N1 vaccination campaign, it appears that management threw out, or decided to ignore, the most basic principles of event planning. If you're interested in organizing a disastrous event, following this twelve-step process will put you on the path to catastrophe.

1. Take your time - Even if you are briefed about the need for a potential event eight months ahead of time, make sure you don't do anything until a week or two before event day. That's just wasted time. If possible, right smack in the middle of the critical period when you need to confirm dates and product availabilities, go on strike for oh, six or seven weeks. During this time, make it illegal for anyone to work on the project.

2. Broaden your guest list - Don't make a list of your preferred guests. Rather, invite everyone on the planet. Take out a series of full-page advertisements in local newspapers to make sure that everyone knows they're invited to attend. For good measure, throw in some warnings about the dire consequences of not showing up.

3. Order limited quantities of everything - Even though you've done your best to ensure everyone in town will attend your event, make the assumption the vast majority will not show up. Order only enough product for a fraction of your guests. Same goes for things that will make the event go smoothly - chairs, pens, clipboards and food. If anyone brings up the words "contingency planning" remove them from the committee.

4. Confirm nothing in advance - You had one phone call months ago with your vaccine supplier and they said you would get a million doses. Now that your event is upon you, there's no need to call and double-check that it's still a go. People always do what they say they're going to do right?

5. Don't hire professionals - Sure, you work in a city with countless experienced event planners but you don't need to hire one of those people to help you. I mean, how hard can it be to organize a few thousand pregnant women, sickly citizens and fractious, bored toddlers.

6. Take the road less travelled - Sit down as a group and think about all the ways you could simplify your campaign roll-out. Ask yourself questions like: Is there any place in our society where large groups of children congregate during the day? or, If only there was a qualified health professional who pregnant women saw on a monthly basis. Decide that there's no such thing and the only way is for you to set up your own clinics.

8. Deliver mixed messages - At the start of your event, divide event staff into ten even groups. Give each group a completely different set of answers to key questions. For example: tell some nurses that kids five and under are eligible for the vaccination and tell others that it's only kids six months to four. Sit back and watch as the hilarity ensues.

9. Don't put any kind of system in place - Despite what centuries of history have taught us about what happens when you get large groups of people together, assume that only those who are eligible will show up, they will self-organize, form an orderly line, and not attempt to hold places in line for other family members. Ignore even the most rudimentary methods of crowd control - a roll of drink tickets or a series of staunchons. You won't need them.

10. Trim your guest list at the last minute - Two days before your event, decide that 90 per cent of the people you have invited are no longer welcome. Make no apologies and offer no assurances about when they will be reinvited.

11. Make sure it's convenient - When planning the event, think about what would be the most convenient time and place for you to hold it. Base this decision on things like the hours you normally like to work, any plans you might have for the evening. Resist the urge to consider things like the convenience of your guests. We don't want to give them too much control.

12. Deny, deny, deny - When the angry mob turns on you, deny that your complete inability to plan had anything to do with the disaster. Wherever possible, blame your suppliers, staff, and other stakeholders.