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Have you ever wondered why professional party planners seem to always keep their cool? Or perhaps you are the go to person that your friends turn to whenever there’s a need to organize a party. In this post we’ re going to talk about a few party planning tips that you can easily implement to make you look like a pro.
6 Party Planning Tips
1) Make sure you allocate enough time for planning. If you happen to be a procrastinator then perhaps being a party organizer is not for you. But if you understand the importance of taking the time, upfront, to plan then you just might find that things unfold hassle free. Now don’t get me wrong, there’ll always be something that will occur that you may not have planned for. That’s just the way Murphy’s Law works. And Murphy’s Law is prevalent in the party planning business.
2) Create and use a party checklist. If you don’t you’re toast. I don’t care how good you think your memory is, you are not going to cover every necessary step in your head. You need to write things on paper and you need to assign due dates.
Here are a few resources that can help with establishing a party checklist:
- Event Checklist, Determining Your Event Objectives (Part One)
- Event Checklist: Determining Your Event Objectives (Part Two)
- Party Planning Checklist – Party Planner’s Map To A Fun, Worry-Free Bash
3) Establish a budget. Once you’ve established your party checklist, it’s now time to assign cost to areas where you need to purchase items. Now often people approach me and say what about the unforeseen or unexpected circumstances. Well, you can budget for these unforeseen items by allocating a small amount of your budget towards miscellaneous purchases. And when you total your budget, including miscellaneous purchases, you must be happy with the amount allocated. Then stick to your budget!
Here are a couple of resources that deal with budgets:
- Event Planning Template for Establishing a Venue Budget
- Event and Party Planning Tip-Attractions and Budgets
4) Create a theme. Creating a theme may sound a lot easier than it really is. This is where you’ll determine whether or not you have the necessary skill set to become a professional party planner. What’s important when establishing a theme for your party is to think of the attendees rather than what you, yourself, would like. That’s where the hard part comes in.
5) Keep F & B simple. By simple I’m not suggesting that you forgo quality at all. Rather think of the scene, or setting, of your party and then design the food menu around that. If people are going to be standing then do not serve food that requires a knife and fork. And food is an important part of a party if you’re serving alcohol. You will want to make sure that there’s an ample amount of food available so that people are not simply drinking without eating. Your guests will thank you.
6) Have a backup plan. I cannot say that enough: have a backup plan. Especially if you’re planning an outdoor event. But you have to think past simply moving your guests from outdoors to indoors as logistics may not support that. You need a true backup plan and you need to set a time frame of how long, what’s needed etc., you will require to implement that backup plan. Your backup plan should stay consistent with your theme. What you’re basically doing by having a backup plan is answering the question “what if?”.
