DIY Event Planning and Event Planning Tips

(This is an old blog entry about DIY event planning from 2005. It may be time to update it. If you have questions about DIY event planning that will help inspire an update, please make contact! – Sooz, August 3, 2011)

For a while I was getting a lot of unsolicited resumes from people who were trying to get into event planning as a career. Many of them would ask how I got into it: did I study it at college, etcetera. The way I got into it was by just doing it. Growing up in Nebraska my parents hosted a lot of events for friends and family: pig roasts, snowmobile tours, reunions, etc. I guess it was a mostly organic thing for me. I’m probably not a typical event planner since I’m not a member of event planning organizations and I don’t do it fulltime exclusively. I’ve mostly focused on my own events such as the social, networking and community building events that I host. Most recently I helped put together the Boston Wi-Fi Summit hosted by the City of Boston and I organize the monthly Boston Wi-Fi Meetup plus the semi-regular Genius Workshop dinners with Shimon Rura. Free Agent Boston has been on a bit of a haitus and will probably be back in action this summer. The biggest event I’ve put together was the Geek Pride Festival that around 3,000 people (from as far away as Sweden) attended. I’d like to top that one of these days.

I was curious what Google had to say about do it yourself event planning (or DIY event planning) and there isn’t a whole lot that turns up. Of course the first page of results is predominantly my own links to WhizSpark. There’s a listing for a company in Tampa who seems to have tricked Google into listing them on the results page even though they are an event planning company who don’t seem to have any resources or information about DIY event planning. A search for “event planning tips” turns up more results but who wants to wade through thousands of results to find a few useful nuggets.

I’d like to compile resources for DIY event planning. If you have anything to share, please post it in the comments. I suppose this is sort of a curated search project. I’m also going to start podcasting my “networking manifesto” sometime soon.

Here are a few tips and resources to start off with:

• WhizSpark: offers an event planning platform for events including an integrated event website with ticketing, guest lists, RSVP, promotion tracking, email newsletters, raffles, etcetera. They’re a good alternative to evite if you want to create a site that doesn’t look cheesy or full of ads.
• “Planning Special Events: Blueprint For Success“: A concise checklist and overview of event planning tips.
• Event Planning Tips Blog: It hasn’t been updated in a while but the archives look interesting.[UPDATE: I missread the date stamps … it has been updated in June.]

Note: If you are an event planning services company, please link back to this entry on one of your blogs and then I’ll approve your comment. Here’s Pete Caputa of WhizSpark’s related entry as an example.