SPCA Pet Day Plan an Event
Start Here
You’re feeling pleased with your work for the SPCA thus far. Pierre charmed the rotary club with his speech, your client has a thriving Instagram presence as well as coverage in print media, and the SPCA blog has seen a spike in hits.
“I wonder if it’s too soon to ask for a promotion?” you find yourself wondering. Your smugness is punctured, however, when you enter the office to see Carmen staring at her monitor emitting a sound halfway between a whinny and a snort.
“Do I have something for you,” she says.
“Bring it on.”
“SPCA leadership got back from their retreat all fired up. Now they want us to plan an event.”
“I’ve hosted parties before.”
“No,” Carmen fixes you with a look, “an event. We have to think about promotion, AV needs, signage, bathrooms, vendors, maps, contracts, parking, so many more details … and a contingency plan in case it hails or the whole town loses power.”
The new business card you’ve pictured in your mind begins to smolder at the edges.
“You will be amazed,” says Carmen, “at the sheer number of details we’re going to need to account for. And the writing, so much writing. A speech, talking points for the spokesperson, live tweets during the event, emails to the internal staff—the volunteers—” Carmen sighs.
“But,” she says, “you won’t handle this alone. I’ve got the event communications plan nearly complete and I’m gathering the other junior account execs to take on some of the work. And who knows, you might enjoy this. You’ll certainly bring all the techniques you’ve learned so far to bear to make our client shine. I’ll follow up with info to get you started right away.”
Carmen’s email arrives within the hour.
FROM: Carmen Amaya, senior account executive
TO: You
SUBJECT: SPCA Pet Day
Click here to open the email.
Hi again,
Those new execs at the SPCA aren’t wasting any time. Our client is holding what they hope will be the first annual Pet Day, a festival meant to raise awareness, increase adoptions, encourage volunteering, boost donations, foster responsible pet care, and lots of other things. In addition to upholding SPCA’s mission, Pet Day will be a fun community event thanks to our flawless organization and oversight. As you can see, we already have a logo.
Your task breakdown is as follows:
Week 1: Event Activity Plan
• Event activity: The SPCA has given us a list of the activities they want for Pet Day (a speech, classes, a dog show), but we need a few more. Your task is to come up with an activity or mini-event of your choice and let us know what needs to be done.
• Event activity evaluation plan: How will we know your activity succeeded and that we should plan for it next year? List a few ways you would assess its success.
Week 2: Event Map, Contingency Planning, and Internal and External Communications
• Event map: Create a map of the event, including indoor and outdoor areas.
• Contingency prioritization list: List the top five contingencies for which we should plan.
• Event invitations: Identify stakeholders to invite and the means of inviting them. Compose two of the invitations.
• Event thank-yous: Identify people to thank and the means of thanking them. Write and plan a thank-you note to two groups or individuals.
• Internal communication to staff: Write an email to SPCA staff about your activity for information and/or recruitment purposes.
Week 3: Event Social Media Kit
• Social media strategy: Add four or five bullet points to this part of the communications plan. Also fill in the Messages part of the plan with your messages from Project 1 and add your stakeholders and any additional publics you’d like to include.
• Social media kit, including the following:
o event hashtag;
o timeline of select tactics as listed below (day of release, time of release);
o three Facebook posts;
o six Twitter posts, with geofencing for at least two; and
o six posts for the platforms of your choice.
Week 4: Traditional Media and Media Relations Products
• Media rep ID: Identify a few media representatives to whom to contact.
• Media advisory: Compose an advisory to help the media representatives figure out which events to cover.
• Spokesperson ID: Identify a spokesperson who will address media reps at the event.
• Talking points: Put together a few points for our media spokesperson.
• Radio PSA script: Write a 30-second script.
• TV PSA script: Write a 30- or 60-second script.
• Speech: Write a two- to three-minute speech for our speaker, whom I’m told is Ellie.
• Your choice: Write, describe, draw, or otherwise produce a traditional (non-social media) product you believe would help Pet Day achieve the SPCA’s organizational objectives.
Below are some documents that will help.
First, this brief will give you more information on the event itself.
• SPCA Pet Day event brief
Here’s the event communications plan, minus a few sections you’ll add. The plan will help you develop traditional media products and choose tactics and platforms for the social media kit.
• SPCA Pet Day event communications plan
Next is the event plan spreadsheet, with 10 tabs. This is an annex to the event communications plan and your master document for this project. You’ll enter, track, and link to all your work in this spreadsheet. Note that certain rows on the Timeline tab are highlighted. The highlights indicate the parts of the plan that you’ll be touching as you complete all the work in this project. They give you a sense of the big picture of the event and how you’re contributing to the whole.
The highlighted cells in the other tabs show where you need to input information, content, or links to other documents. All will be explained as you go through the project steps.
• SPCA Pet Day event plan spreadsheet
Finally, I’m attaching a checklist for this project so that you can keep track of where you are and how many tasks you have left at any given point.
• SPCA Pet Day checklist
Study these documents carefully before you begin; they provide an excellent orientation to this project.
I’m here to help as always.
In your work with the SPCA, you’ve created different products for different publics. An event is another communications product designed to further the organization’s objectives, but it’s infinitely more complex than most products and has myriad other products to support it. Events often get their own annex in a communications plan. Sometimes, if the event is big enough or not part of a larger campaign, it will get its own communications plan, as in this case.
An important annex to the event plan is an event plan spreadsheet that provides a timeline as well as tabs that account for every item needed, from legal requirements to the tweet that deploys before the band starts. For instance, if you’re going to have vendors, you might need to send out a vendor prospectus, organize contracts and invoices, dedicate a team member to handling vendor needs, find a location for the vendors, time vendor setup and breakdown, put the vendor area on the event map, make sure there are waste disposal implements nearby, and send out a survey after the event so that the vendors can assess their experience and make recommendations for next year. These tasks would be laid out on the timeline as well as on other related tabs.
Luckily, you’re not arranging for every little detail in this project. You’ll plan for one event activity and use the already existing event plan spreadsheet and other resources to consider the needs for that activity. In addition, you’ll jot down some ideas for evaluating the success of your addition to the plan. Evaluation is a key part of every communications plan; in the RPIE and other models, it drives the iteration and improvement of the plan. The success of next year’s Pet Day will depend on the data you gather this year and how you make use of it. As you rise in the ranks at Parabolic, you’ll focus more and more on communications strategy and its continual refinement.
The contingency plan is an important part of event planning, helping to ensure that you have backup locations and courses of action in case of foul weather and other eventualities. Even though others will plan for the contingencies, your work in identifying them will familiarize you with the types of frameworks used by organizations to evaluate and plan for risk. Anticipating disasters and preparing for their mitigation are tasks you’ll perform on a much larger scale later on at Parabolic.
Mapping is another part of event planning. You not only have to provide maps to attendees, but also make sure the event team knows where everything is located. Mapping helps you ensure that all the components and timed elements of the event will work in concert with each other rather than conflicting and causing logistical nightmares. It also helps you strategically direct the flow of attendees and prevent crowding.
Stakeholder correspondence is another vital aspect of event planning. To ensure an enjoyable and well-attended event, you have to reach out to different groups in different ways. Planning and writing invitations, expressing thanks, and composing internal communications for Pet Day will help you round out your understanding of communications products.
Based on the social media strategies outlined in an event communications plan, a social media kit contains the products used to promote the event to your publics and accomplish the event goals and objectives via social media. For the NazarOps project, you produced one tweet; in this project, you’ll think more strategically as you plan pre- and post-event tweets along with tweets to launch during the event. You’ll get to come up with products for Facebook and other platforms. One social media tool you haven’t used yet at Parabolic is geofencing, in which different communications are conveyed to different publics depending on their physical location. You might want, for example, to tell only those at the event that a raffle is being held right now on the mainstage—after all, who else would care? You might expand your reach to the greater area in posting photos of the prizewinners, as this would show anyone within driving distance how much fun the attendees are having. Finally, you might spare publics outside the local area any news of the raffle; they would likely filter it out as noise. Too many irrelevant communications will cause your publics to stop paying attention.
In addition to all of the above, you’re conducting media relations to ensure clear and accurate coverage of Pet Day. This involves not only selecting media representatives and alerting them with an advisory, but identifying a spokesperson to meet with the media and giving that spokesperson talking points. As you work through this aspect of event planning, you’ll learn about establishing and maintaining relationships with the media, key to the success of any organization.
Finally, you’ll work on a few traditional media products. Some of these, such as the speech, will help you build on skills you’ve developed. You’ll also create less familiar products as you write for radio and television. The latter medium will require you to think visually and engage your storyboarding creativity.
The idea with all your event communications products—internal and external, social and traditional—is to accomplish your event’s goals and objectives as well as conveying to your publics and stakeholders what, when, and where the event is; why it’s important; why they want to be involved; how to best be involved; and how and why to support the organization and its mission outside the event. There is quite a lot riding on your deliverables, which must also appear natural and unforced! With each product, you’ll have to consider how to convey your messages most effectively. You obviously can’t accomplish all of the above in one tweet, nor would you want to. It helps to be mindful of the gestalt as you make your tactical decisions.
Planning Your Work
You have four weeks to plan the event and produce all associated deliverables; be sure to read through all the steps of the project first so that you can plan your time wisely. Complete the steps as follows:
• Week 7: Steps 1–2
o submission in Step 2
• Week 8: Steps 3–5
• Week 9: Step 6
o submission in Step 6
• Week 10: Steps 7–12
o submission in Step 11
Project 4: Plan an Event
Step 1: Learn About Event Planning
Now that you’ve read the event brief and the event communications plan and reviewed the event plan spreadsheet timeline, learn about events themselves and their role in strategic communications.
First of all, why have an event? As you no doubt inferred from everything you’ve read so far, events are complex beasts. They require an enormous commitment in terms of time, money, and human resources. A lot can go wrong, as you’ll discover when you work on the contingency list. What makes an event worth the outlay and risks?
The answer, at least in part, is that events are a highly impactful way to communicate with your publics, draw them in, create an emotional attachment, and move individuals along from being members of a latent public to members of an active one. Events can also be a means of raising your visibility (in a positive way) to a level unattainable by most other means.
For example, if you worked for a nonprofit promoting clean waterways, you could hold an event on the river with boat rentals, riverbank walking tours, a picnic lunch, and live music. This would help you put a face on your organization, attract volunteers, boost donations, and raise awareness in your community, making what might be a permanent difference to your organization, especially if the event were recurring. Imagine all your attendees inviting their friends next year and sharing information about the event on social media. You can see the lure of this type of endeavor!
To determine whether an event will be worth the effort, it helps to consider the tasks involved. The resources in What Is an Event Plan? provide insight into the logistics of hosting an event, from site inspection to budgeting. Also study one organization’s guide to event planning, the phenomenal Event Planning 101: How to Plan a Veg Fest. This guide will give you a comprehensive understanding of event-planning tasks and how they’re timed, according to one organization that hosts an annual food festival. As you will see, each organization handles event planning in its own way, though the major needs remain the same.
In addition to logistical, financial, and communications details, there are legal issues in event planning that need to be considered lest your painstakingly planned event become a PR nightmare. The last thing you want is to neglect licensing or permitting needs, create safety violations, or fail to make your event accessible. There are, of course, ethical issues in event planning as well; you wouldn’t want to clutter your river with balloons, paint faces with non-water-soluble dyes, or schedule volunteers for long hours without a break.
You might notice in the Pet Day event plan timeline that the SPCA has accounted for legal requirements in the areas of contracting, facilities, licensing, permitting, security, sanitation, health and safety, fire, and information, such as in providing adoption fact sheets to prospective adoptees. These are just a few legal concerns; the organization will also have to comply with any noise codes or building codes, such as making sure the number of people in the convention center rooms does not exceed the limit set in the building codes. Because attendees are bringing pets, the SPCA must ensure the presence of scooper baggies, water bowls, and other implements for ensuring health and sanitation. Animals up for adoption must also be cared for, hence, the animal health and safety inspections that will occur at regular intervals.
Ethically, the SPCA must communicate about Pet Day truthfully. The SPCA must provide accurate information about all animals up for adoption; state how donations will be used; use all donated funds for their intended purpose; and avoid manipulative tactics such as showing maltreated animals on the jumbotron or representing pet ownership as cheap, easy, and requiring little time investment. These are just a few ethical considerations that will go into Pet Day.
By now, you might be asking yourself, what does it take to be an event planner? Clearly, quite a bit! Luckily, your first foray into planning an event at Parabolic will be confined to a discrete activity within Pet Day itself. Peruse the above resources carefully, because they will help you through the next step.
Project 4: Plan an Event
Step 2: Event Activity: Add to the Event Plan (Submission)
Now that you’ve studied the nature of events and the attention to detail required, you’ll organize a mini-event within Pet Day. The SPCA has already planned several activities—classes, grooming, adoption, veterinary services. However, it could stand a few more. The planning committee has bounced around some ideas: pet games, activities for children, a photography booth, live music, something food-related.
Your job is to add an activity to this event. This can be one of the options listed above or an idea of your choosing.
Once you’ve identified your activity, use the SPCA Pet Day new activity brainstorming sheet to account for all the items your activity will need. You’ll find a lot of guidance in your Step 1 readings and will likely add some rows to the brainstorming sheet. The Veg Fest guide is a treasure trove of ideas. Conducting a search related to your activity will help as well. There is no right or wrong here, though you’ll want to be as thorough as possible.
Your activity doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Let’s say you wanted to set up a station to amuse children and decided on a balloon animal tent. You would want to arrange for staffing and balloon animal-making implements—including their ethical use and disposal. You would want to set up areas where your guests could sit comfortably. You would also want to let attendees know about your activity; you could make up signs or flyers for the welcome table. Locating your tent near a donation table or pet adoption area might be a good idea if you think parents might mill around while their children enjoyed the balloon making. Locating the tent too close to the jumbotron or a stage, however, might not work if a larger spectacle might compete with your balloonist.
You not only want to consider every aspect of your activity but find out how well it succeeded after the event. An evaluation plan will assist in next year’s Pet Day, where you’ll decide to either use, omit, or modify your activity. Underneath the activity brainstorming table in the brainstorming sheet, list three ways you might evaluate the success of your activity. The Evaluation section of the event communications plan might help you generate ideas. The social media resources in Step 6 are also useful, as well as the Veg Fest documents, which contain a few surveys. As with the activity plan itself, there is no hard right or wrong to gathering evaluation data. You’ll gain more experience in this part of communications planning later on at Parabolic.
Once you finish brainstorming, make your first entries in the SPCA Pet Day event plan spreadsheet. If you haven’t done so already, download and save the event plan, adding your name to the file so that it’s FirstInitial_LastName SPCA Pet Day Event Plan Spreadsheet. Enter a cleaned-up version of your brainstorming information on the New Activity tab and link your document so that Carmen can see what you were considering.
Now, turn to the Event Timeline tab. Enter new rows for each item, component, or consideration you listed for your activity. Your rows will likely be more specific than the row items currently on the timeline, and more numerous relative to the other activity logistics. This is fine; fit in your row items where they seem appropriate, looking at the pre-event, event, and post-event sections and considering all aspects of the timeline, including the communications sections. Highlight your new rows in a light color such as green. If you look at Row 11 in the original version of the timeline, you’ll see a sample row that includes the kind of information you would enter, complete with timing information (start date/time and due date/time).
Don’t worry if your rows are redundant or seem overly detailed. The purpose of this is to give you another way to think about your activity’s needs, when they should be met, and how they fit into the overall event plan. Not only will this exercise benefit the other Pet Day planners, it will help you later on at Parabolic when you assemble this kind of spreadsheet from scratch.
Cross-check your brainstorming sheet with your timeline rows and then submit your Excel spreadsheet and brainstorming document to Carmen so that she can provide feedback.
Your work related to the new activity isn’t over. The activity will feature in some of your other Pet Day products, such as the event map, the internal email, the social media kit, and the media advisory.
Project 4: Plan an Event
Step 3: Event Products: Create the Event Map
Now that you’ve planned an activity, it’s time to channel your spatial creativity and create the event map. You’ll actually map two areas—the town green and the convention center—and create a map key. Your map will include items relevant to your Pet Day attendees. It will also include items pertinent only to your internal publics, such as a break room, staff parking lot, and pet crate storage area. Your map will be used internally, with attendees receiving a modified version.
Luckily, you won’t have to start from scratch. One of the Parabolic artists has created SPCA Pet Day indoor and outdoor diagrams. These are provided in PowerPoint, with a space for the map key in the upper right quadrant, but you can also access the image files separately: you can download the (1) map of the town green; (2) map of the convention center, lower floor; and (3) map of the convention center, upper floor. The sample maps in the Event Map topic above will help you think of how to display the items the map needs and also how to set up your key.
There are a few ways you can go about creating your map and key. You can use PowerPoint; you can print the diagrams and draw directly on them or use physical cutouts of icons (easy to move around!); or you can choose some other approach. PowerPoint has icons, and there are many free icon repositories online. You can also draw your icons. Remember to credit anyone whose icons you use, even if they’re in the public domain.
However you set up your map, make sure you (a) include all the items in the list, (b) provide a key, and (c) produce an image that can be zoomed in and out by whoever is viewing it. If you work on hard copies, make sure you can scan them.
Click here to see a list of the items you’ll put on the map.
• entrance;
• porta-johns;
• food vendors;
• merchandise vendors;
• stages;
• off-leash area where attendees can let their pets run around;
• attendee parking;
• staff, vendor, and volunteer parking;
• jumbotron for streaming video content, such as SPCA footage, happy pets in happy families, short speeches by SPCA leadership, people who have adopted pets, SPCA volunteers;
• CEO speech;
• nutrition classes;
• behavior classes;
• dog care classes;
• cat care classes;
• other pet care classes;
• grooming classes;
• welcome table where volunteers will hand out maps and information, have a signup sheet for the newsletter, provide adoption information, and pass out stickers with the Pet Day logo;
• donations tables;
• pet adoption area;
• pet crate storage area;
• pet grooming station;
• veterinarian station;
• dog show;
• media risers to help photographers and videographers get an even view of important activities; and
• [your activity].
You’ll want to place some of these items in multiple locations; for instance, it’s unlikely that you’ll arrange for only one porta-john. You can use one stage for multiple events or add a different stage for each event. It’s up to you as to how many items to place and where to place them. Refer to the event brief as needed and consider how many people are coming to this event.
Here are some questions to get you started.
• What needs power? Note the location of the electrical hookup boxes.
• What is happening when? If you choose a convention center room for one of the activities, make sure you don’t double-book it for another activity happening at the same time.
• What will clash if placed in close proximity? If you have a band as your activity, where can it be placed so that the noise won’t drown out any other activities?
• How should you direct the flow of traffic? Consider how you want the attendees to experience the event after they enter the gates. Where should the donation tables be? The adoption area(s)? How can you prevent overcrowding at any one location?
• What should be indoors and what outdoors?
• How do you want to make use of the various spaces? There are three parking lots; might one serve a purpose other than parking?
• Where do you want the media to focus? Considering that videographers and photographers can access everything by walking around, where do you want to ensure the best stationary coverage? The media risers will provide a level space to ensure professional-quality footage.
• What should the map key include? Depending on the icons you use, items such as bathrooms, food areas, and stages might be self-explanatory and might not need mention in the key itself. You might want to label some of the elements directly on the map. Look at the sample event maps in the Event Map learning topic for ideas.
There is no right or wrong answer to these questions, only what might make more or less sense depending on how you want your attendees to experience the event.
Finally, don’t view the list of map items as limiting. If you want to place more activities on the map (such as mini-events your colleagues are planning, additional items you saw on the event brief or timeline, or activities or stations that you think would enhance Pet Day but aren’t mentioned anywhere), go ahead and do this. Add illustrations, use your design magic, make the map your own.
Once you’ve created your map, go to the Event Map tab on the event plan spreadsheet and write a sentence for each item in the Reason for location column explaining why you placed the item where you did. This is an important part of the assignment; Carmen will want to know your rationale for placement as she reviews your map.
Once you’ve made any revisions based on the comments of your peers or perhaps Carmen, link your file or files in the correct cell of the Event Map tab in the event plan spreadsheet and make sure all the other golden cells are filled out.
Next, you’ll identify and prioritize contingencies.