Learn from the Olympics How to Organize your Events: Part 1 of 3
- Planning Event Logistics
With the Winter Olympic Games in Torino underway, on time and
over budget, it feels like a good time to take a minute and look
at the lessons the Olympics have to teach us about managing
events. To be fair, the Olympics are a massive set of groups
with multiple venues hosting simultaneous events with visitors
from all over the world. To make matters worse, you only get to
do it once, you prepare for years leading up to it, when it
arrives you try the best that you can to control the chaos for
just over 2 nonstop weeks and then, in a blink of an eye, it is
over. While there is a chance that your children or
grandchildren will be involved in hosting the Games again, for
most people involved there is no next time.
It is still too soon to look closely at what has and has not
worked for the Winter Games in Torino. It is not until all the
smoke has cleared that they will know how the event really went.
I did however, have the good fortune of being involved with
hosting the Salt Lake Winter Games (2002) while I was a college
student in Provo, UT. Those Olympics are now four years old and
time has given us a great perspective to glean some valuable
lessons from them and the way that they were managed.
For the sake of learning, let's skip past the Olympic bid
scandal and look at the things that were done right for those
games.
Let's start with logistics in this part of our series - I-15 was
under construction for years before the Olympic Games were held,
but more importantly, some one had clearly thought out the most
popular routes to the venues and where people would be going
within the venues. The roads were modified to accommodate the
increased traffic and the venues were laid out with the fans in
mind. I spent most of my time during the 2002 Olympics at
Soldier Hollow, the Cross Country Ski and Biathlon Venue. You
could tell that time was spent to design the venue in such a way
as to give the fans the most access to the course while making
it a great course for the athletes competing. Often times this
is a detail that is overlooked for smaller events. The venue
will be decorated in a manner that looks great, often times at
the expense of functionality.
It is also important to take the time to think through how
people are going to arrive and leave your event. Look for things
that might make it harder for people to attend and try to handle
those issues in advance. I was involved in an event once where
there was construction on the primary route. Since the location
was vaguely familiar to most of the people attending we sent out
flyers warning people about the construction and advising them
of alternate routes that were available. Printing little maps on
the back of your tickets is also a great way to help people get
to your event.
The goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to 1) get
to your event and 2) do what you want them to do when they
arrive.
Next: Planning a Profitable Event