What is this event for?

I’ve spent a lot of my career designing programmes and bringing senior people together, and I’ve often been surprised by how difficult it can be to answer a seemingly simple question:

Why are you doing this event?

Events are expensive and time-consuming, often for senior leaders as well as for the events, marketing or communications teams behind them, so being clear about their purpose really matters.

The difficulty is that the answer is rarely just one thing.

An event might be intended to build brand recognition, support fundraising, generate revenue, develop new business, strengthen a community, educate an audience, influence a debate or drive action.

And that’s where it becomes important to get much more specific.

If the aim is awareness, do you want as many people as possible to hear about your organisation? Or do you specifically want senior decision-makers in energy investment to know who you are?

If fundraising is part of the objective, who are you trying to reach? A strategy for engaging charitable foundations might look very different from one designed around individual donors.

“Raising our profile” or “bringing people together” can be useful starting points. But they’re not really enough to design an event around.

The clearer you can be about what you want to change, with whom and why, the easier it becomes to make good decisions about the audience, format, programme and speakers.

And, ultimately, to work out whether the event is worth doing at all.