The ultimate guide for planning a sports event
An event allows you to gather your target audience around a celebration or entertainment activity. Although there are several formats and activities on which to focus your event, there are some guidelines that you should always comply with in its planning and organisation to make it a success.
5 Key elements of planning a sports event
To be more practical, we will go through these 5 steps based on planning a sports event. As with most large events focused on leisure and entertainment, when planning a sports event, you will need to focus on finding sponsors to make your race, tournament, competition or masterclass profitable. In addition, you will have to obtain the necessary licences from the corresponding town hall or facility to hold the event. Before knowing how to organise a succesfull sport event its time to focus on the key elements for planning.
That is why we recommend you to follow these 5 keys based on our experience planning sports events. They will help you to focus on what is most important, while the rest of the tasks follow an organised execution.
1) Be familiar with the format you are going to run, in our case, sport.
You are not only dealing with a wide range of sports disciplines, but also with a considerable variety of modalities. You can opt for a short-term event, ranging from a several-day tournament, with its corresponding variables, to a sports day. On the other hand, you can opt for a long-term competition or ranking with several connected sports events.
It is advisable that, as you gain experience, you try out new formats of the sports that you master the most. Subsequently, you can try out new sport modalities with experts or professionals of that sport, who will help you to take into account those details that users will demand in that sports niche.
2. Define your event coordinator or hire an expert.
As we mentioned at the beginning, you will need a person in charge of those tasks in which you contribute less value, so you can focus on what is really important, such as sponsorships, permits, and user acquisition strategy.
For this, we recommend hiring a person to support you in the logistics of your sports event. Their tasks and responsibilities should be perfectly defined:
- Management of material resources, such as padel balls, prizes, catering, and trophies in a padel tournament.
- Assembly and disassembly of the fundamental material for the execution of the event, such as the assembly of tarpaulins, megaphones, fences, arches, and runway lighting of a popular race.
- Management of the event's support staff.
In many cases, you can entrust these tasks to a person related to the facilities where the event is held or to a professional in the sport concerned, who has experience in the planning of sports events.
3. Establish the objective of your event before making the financial forecast.
You can opt for a business goal, trying to get an economic return from the event, or for a strategic goal, with which to reach a large mass of users. This decision will be determined depending on whether your objective is to communicate a novelty, to have more brand recognition, or to get a direct economic return from the action.
When planning and organising the rest of the tasks of your sports event, this objective will mark important decisions such as attracting sponsors to a greater or lesser extent.
4. Think about the user experience "before, during and after" the event.
Known as the "Customer Journey", this process will give you the expectations your user will have and when you can surprise them with something different.
Get the help of a professional sports user to tell you what it is like from the inside, and plan with them all the tasks to be carried out. It will be essential that you meet the expectations at those critical points of the event.
5. Define and schedule your attraction strategy.
This involves knowing perfectly in which channels you are going to communicate to your potential users that your sports event is starting... in which media will I appear, will I appear in social networks with a paid campaign or through collaborators, will I apply a special discount to users who have already participated in previous events, when do I consider my deadline to obtain a minimum number of participants?
These are questions that need to be answered when planning a sports event, and which will keep you on an organised schedule.
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