Collaborative Event Planning: A 6-Step Guide to Event Co-Creation

Event co-creation is one of the most popular approaches to boost interaction and participation at an event. The goal is to understand and engage potential attendees. Plus, event co-creation also becomes an effective means of marketing your event through digital platforms.

One of the biggest challenges in planning and executing an event is to understand the desires and needs of the attendees. In order to be a successful event professional, you need to aggregate and represent the expectations in the most creative and immersive way possible. Ensure the event objectives are successfully reached and the event engages attendees in a positive experience.

To achieve this, you can use the event co-creation method. This strategy focuses on encouraging collaboration across all stakeholders to run the event and put a unique perspective on the event. According to Connect the Dots, co-creation aims to bring diverse voices together to produce the most desirable possible outcome for all parties involved. 

In addition, Eventtia quotes professor K.B. Akhilesh saying that co-creation should be value-based and context-driven, aiming to develop new paradigms, innovations in products, or new services to satisfy human wants. 

The dynamic context is necessary for event co-creation; it extends beyond traditional engagement strategies. As cyberspace and digital communications advance, collective intelligence and democratization become easier. Individual views on the subject can be collected to produce collective knowledge that is convenient to access, enhanced, and coordinated in real-time. As noted in Skift, this can make collaboration and group decision consensus easier to achieve. 

Doing event co-creation can show that you, as a host or event planner, care about your attendees and put in an effort to provide what they need. Each event could also be a one-of-a-kind experience that drives more attendance and engagement so that it could potentially result in higher event ROI.

 A 6-Step Guide to Event Co-Creation

If you are planning to make an event with a co-creation approach, here are some steps and tips to make it work. 

Engage Potential Attendees

Encourage communication and engagement with potential attendees weeks before the event. State the purpose and the goals of the event as clearly as possible. Describe which part of the event requires their opinions and contributions. Don't forget to direct your audience so they understand how they can participate in the co-creation process. 

Make Participation Easy

After starting to engage, you need to make sure that you put extra effort into making audiences and potential attendees easier to engage. You can create a simple event website or use a social media platform to conduct a content poll. Either way, it's better to invite your potential attendees to give their opinions and participate in event co-creation in advance.

Inspire More Involvement

If you already opened a way for your audience to participate, inspire them more by explaining the benefits of contributing to your event’s co-creation. Consider partnering with sponsors to offer prizes or incentives for those who participate more, or create a system for getting rewards. This is important because sometimes people need more motivation to get involved deeper. In addition, if it includes a more complex idea collection process such as writing a public opinion or comment post and sharing ideas content

Idea Assessment and Selection

After collecting as many ideas as possible, now you need to assess and pick the most suitable ideas to be applied to your event. It is possible to start with a team meeting or to ask for the crowd's help by publishing ideas and looking at which gets the most likes and shares. Having been selected, you still need to put the ideas into action for them to become tangible aspects of the event. Make contact with the individuals who have this idea in order to get a deeper explanation or suggestion.

Create the Event Hype

Once you are sure about the event concept and execution that is most relevant to your audiences and potential attendees, it is time to create awareness of the upcoming and final event. It is possible to make pre-event engagements to attract people who will participate in the co-creation of the event. They are more likely to have an emotional connection through their effort and commitment to the process and they potentially will buy in and promote it to their relatives. 

In conclusion, by doing event co-creation, you can have a more creative way of marketing your event on digital platforms. Also, on the day of the event, it can potentially become a space where your attendees have the ability to design their own experience. In this way, they can interact and collaborate, create meaningful interactions, and use their own skills and expertise. That will be the future of event experiences. 

Also Read: Event Industry Growth: How to Stay Ahead