How We Do It: Event Design
Collaborative Minds: Crafting the Perfect Event Design Layout. Photo credit: Tideway Creative
[Image Description: A group of people are viewing a printed copy of the venue layout attached to a clipboard.]
A well-designed event creates a seamless, powerful attendee experience. Imagine all the elements coming together: timing, space, food and beverage. Visuals, sound, messages, actions, activations, and interactions. With care and attention, each of these elements enhances and amplifies the others, and your event will add up to much MORE than the sum of its parts.
Design is also the perfect place to dig into Community-Centric Fundraising principles to help us make less toxic choices, spend the budget intentionally, and make sure all the voices in your community are being expressed and community members are honored and uplifted in the final product. Thoughtful event design is your opportunity to create a great experience for the workers, volunteers, stage speakers, and organization staff during the event (not JUST a great event for the event guests)!
If your event feels like it is mostly based on traditions, and hasn’t been redesigned in a while, it can be fun to look at the event through some new lenses to freshen things up. Here are some frameworks we like to use as we approach event design and content:
Make choices to support the guest experience across the classic 5 senses: sight (visual elements including decor, lighting, and videos), taste (food and beverage), touch (textures, temperature), smell (scent), sound (music, voices, and anything else).
Design your content and activities to meet people where they are, with their divergent learning styles: this is vital if your event seeks to make a connection with guests and get them to hold a greater understanding of your organization’s work. Are you serving the various types of learners - auditory, visual, kinetic, naturalist, musical/mathematical, linguistic, interpersonal, and internal learners— in your audience? Most people learn with a blend of a few different learning styles, so you’ll need to deliver your message in a few ways in order to reach everyone.
Build FOR your specific community, in as many ways as possible. What do you know about the people who are coming to your event? It’s time to learn about them. Demographics such as age and gender can be helpful, at a basic level. What interests, activities, cultural touchstones, or tastes might these people share? Accessibility needs must be considered, of course. But psychographics are also useful - what type of connection does each guest have to your organization? What are they expecting from our time together? Make specific choices with your community in mind, and your event will instantly become less generic and much, much more interesting.
As a final check before making each decision (especially those that you might be making out of habit or tradition), check with care and see how it aligns with the event goals you made during your strategy sessions (see our previous post). You may find yourself making design choices that don’t lead directly towards fulfilling this year’s event goals, or even undercutting your intentions. When this happens, don’t settle! You need to keep going and find a better option.
At Synchronicity, we love working on nonprofit events because of the real, urgent task of building a special place and time to hold the spirit of your community. The events we work on are always more meaningful than a simple celebration - there’s something real that must be accomplished.
We design for results. Design work begins in our first meeting, and continues in various forms through event day. Being fully, creatively, and thoughtfully engaged in this whole process is one of the main rewards of doing this work with our clients. And it’s one reason we decline any requests to provide “day-of-event-only” production services. We can really unlock the true power of your event if we are on board as your event design partners. If you are dreaming of an event any time in 2024, let’s talk - we’re booking now!
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