Event Management for Tourism and Hospitality.

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Introduction:

Worldwide, events are being hosted. They have the capability to attract people from
around the world, bringing them closer ( Milgrom, 2002). They are a source of
entertainment and inspiration. They are educative and informative. People from
varied backgrounds come together and witness culture of different ethnicity. Not
only, they are enjoyable activities but they also, have the strength to lower one’s
prejudiced and increases one’s tolerance. Festivals and cultural events can have
great impact in reducing racial discrimination and make people more open and
adaptive to the different viewpoints. These a lot of countries use these events and
local cultures and integrate them into their developmental strategies. They bring
tourists from around the world which in turn results in developmental growth. They
are commercially viable for a place, there is an influx of incomes, local trades and
increased investment. Not only that, they also help in conservation of culture and
heritage of a country and becomes a source of livelihood for many in the local
regions.

Plans for Managing:

Recently, we hosted a similar event on festivals and events of cultural significance

for CU Conventry. The event attracted not only 30000+ people from around the
globe but the coverage it got on the national and international news, it sets a
precedence of what we can expect in the coming years. The event was a blast and
we have to give the credit to entire team who has put their heart and soul to organize
this. They had spent months and months on this, creative campaigns were built ,
engagement was ensured from the very beginning. Not only that the venue was
carefully decided, all the legal work and procedure was taken care of, the
decorations and arrangements of first aid units & ambulances, in case of mishaps,
managing the crowd and streamlining the process, all was painstakingly taken care
of (Hansen, 2003). The reward was many a happy face, a great coverage and reviews
and finally, people asking for when are we hosting our next festival. All in all, a great
success.

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The event started off with a plan. We as a team had spent a lot of time and put in a
lot of thoughts to the initial marketing campaign of the event.

Event marketing if put simply is the art of leveraging different tools ,platforms and
techniques in reaching out to the target audience and influence their decision to
attend and partake in the event (Thomas and Loos, 2008).

We had divided our marketing campaigns into 5 categories. There was a pre-event,
event launch, day to day marketing for the event, final call for the event and finally
post event feedback (Quinn, 2009).

Complexities and the process:

Before even starting the event, we had segment the audience that we wanted to
target. We chose United Kingdom based ranging from Freshman years, Seniors, 21
to 35 years old alumni. This is the group, who always looks for uniquely stimulating
opportunities for entertainment as well as it can be a part of the alumni reunion of
sorts for people who have passed out and would want to revisit and re-unite with
their class and friends. This was an opportunity for the alumni to reconnect as well.
There are freshman who want either to establish unique identities for themselves or
alumni who wants follow the passion for cultural fests and feel part of elite group. We
also, got hold of the list of people who had attended or showed interest to attend the
previous events, alumni names and the list of students from CU Coventry and UK’s
prestigious universities and alumni.

We had contacted museums to loan us the artefacts in order to garner interest in our
history and stories about where came from, our ancestors and how we have evolved
culturally. We got sponsorships for the event. We reached out to some of the CEOs,
business owners and the entrepreneurs for potential sponsors. We had great
success in having them invest at the event. A total of 12 sponsors invested in various
amounts in the event along with ex CU Coventry band who had made it big in
Europe agreed to perform at the event.

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For the pre event campaigns, we had created a pre event website with histories
regarding the culture, past events, had past student and attendees testimonials put
up along with that we were running a photo contest of the previous cultural events,
capturing the ethnicity of the event.

We also, partnered with student bloggers and thought leaders to write articles, create
funny memes and Vlog about the event prior to launching it. This was done on digital
platform and social media platforms. The reason for this was to create enough
anticipation for the actual event amongst the target audience and also make them
curious as to what comes next. People shared their experiences and have inspired
others who are relatively new to these cultural events. We have been able to get
over a million followers on our social media platforms and a footfall of 3000 people
daily, visiting the pre event page (Gray, 2007).

After running the prevent campaign, we had launched the event which was routed
from our pre-event page itself. On social media too we revealed the date and venue
of the cultural event, along with the agenda, performing artists information and the
ancient culturally linked artifacts that would be displayed at the event itself.

We also partnered with 3 distributors, from where the tickets could be bought. At this
stage , we were running both offline and online marketing campaigns. We had
posters made, that were distributed and placed at colleges, libraries and malls close
to the universities in UK. The reason for choosing the latter was because that is
where you will find students spending their free time. We held on site activation
launches at prestigious colleges, and the malls. During those activation we held
various quiz contests, flash dances and other small game shows. In addition to that,
we had the band artist to promote the event on their instagram pages and tweeting
about the event using their twitter profile.

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Contests were held, kiosks were place for people to book tickets, we also had
apparel and souvenirs with our event logo printed on it. Winners had a range of
prices from free tickets to a range of souvenirs. In addition to all the above, email
marketing was done and local celebrities were hired to promote the event as well.
We also asked people from previously attended events to post on their social media
pages, write testimonies and their own experiences. In addition to this mass email
campaign where done. We had email campaigns being run in every 4 days, till the
event day, in order to create a momentum and maintain it as well ( Schoenmakers,
2007).

Along with that we were running an early bird offer for a month, where in the ticket
prices were at a discounted pricing. We divided this early bird offer in 2 parts.
Individual tickets bought in the first two weeks will get a discount of 25% and when
bought after the initial two-week till the 4th week the discount was at 15%. This was
all about early bird offer (Carlsen, 2004).

After the event launch and the marketing campaigns, we had fifty thousand people
who were either interested in the event, or registered or bought tickets on our
website, leveraging our distributors and buying directly at kiosks. This was a
phenomenal success of our marketing efforts and planning.

The actual event was 3 days long, with food, beverages, exhibitions by students and
sponsors, dancing and music and live bands. We also, invited student bands giving
them the stage, after carefully auditioning them. Music was selected based on their
relevancy to the event. On the days of the events, we had volunteers taking care of
the crowd. They were there to streamline the crowd, answer their queries, guide
them towards the right places, take care of their coupons for food, drinks and
games . In addition to that we had contacted the local authorities for the safety and
security at the venue. Metal detectors were placed and we had police officers
present at the venue, responsible for the security of the attendees. We also, had to
get our permission for the loud speakers, fire departments sanction an permission

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from the university’s deans and boards. We had also, contacted caterers and hired
school canteen staff for food. The event ran for full 3 days and we had a lot of happy
faces, pictures, social media updates linked to our hash tags and national media.

After the event, we had people upload pictures, share their feedback, using our hash
tags, on social media pages and on Instagram. We even had newspapers doing an
article on our event and how it is important for universities to hold such event to bring
people closer to their roots as well as it is medium to attract foreign students and
tourists.

Legal And Regulatory Issues In Event Planning

As the head of the events organizing committee, my job was to manage and
supervise my entire team. We had a team of 20 people from different departments
as well as from senior team, who already had an experience of organizing events. As
the head, I had divided the teams, based on their skill set. Somewhere part of the
technical and the marketing team. They worked in tandem to create the landing page
and handle the online and offline marketing campaigns. There were designers and
content writers to in that team, for creating artwork and content for the campaigns.
Then there were team, who liaise with the alumni and the sponsors for the event,
then we had vendor managers for lights, decorations, food, beverages and then
finally, we had one person in-charge of the legalities related to the event. She was
incharge of getting permissions and ensuring that all legal and regulatory issues
were taken care of. As the leader and a person with past event organizing
experience, I had immensely enjoyed the role. I also, learnt quite a bit about different
regulatory bodies that get involved for an event of this scale. For an event of 500
plus attendees, which runs beyond 11:00PM at the night we need permission from
the authority under the license protect act of 2003, which normally takes 28 days.
However, we did face some objections from the authorities, with respect to safety,
proper conduct by the student body and over possible involvement of illegal items
(Calidoni-Lundberg,2006). Thus, we had a hearing in the court where we had to give the
authorities the assurance of proper conduct at the event. Based on our history and
past successful events with no major fall out we got the permission, even though it
was delayed a bit. After that, we had to take permissions from university’s regulatory

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bodies as well as multiple other permissions. We went to the non-statutory bodies
called safety advisory group, who helped us filling up the application. From helping
us in adhering to data protection, to getting consent for road blocks, gas, electricity
and food safety to getting the premise license in which the university board aided us
to a large extent.

Effectiveness of the Event:

All the effort made by our team, and the support we got from the CU Coventry
students made this event a grand success. We have students who have raved about
us on their Instagram , Twitter and Face book posts. Our dean has given us special
recognition and certificates for our efforts as well plans to put up a post about this
event on the university’s official webpages. We had one alumni, come to us and tell
us in person about how good we were at this. He was himself running an events
management company and offered us a pre placement offer at his company itself. All
these testimonials and accolades are the validation of how successful we have been.

However, there were times, when we had faced problems. Specially, the time when
he had to go to a hearing for getting event license. We had to get help of a lawyer
and at the time we felt, that we will not be able to make it. Additionally, at the event
we had some issues between the university students. There a was conflict between
two student groups that led to physical fight. That was resolved in time with help of
police at the venue however, there were few cuts and bruises, that were taken care
by the first aid team. I believe, in terms of time management . We planned
everything, but didn’t take into account that there are times when during the time
execution we did not consider the buffer time. We had learnt a great deal from
planning to execute to organizing the event, which not only bought students closer
but made them more aware of our roots and origin.

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Milgrom, J. (2002). Two decades of Event Marketing and Sponsorship, I have good
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Quinn, B., 2009. Festivals, events and tourism.

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management.

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