Planning an Event? Hire an Event Planning Assistant from Wishup

Events aren’t just corporate hoo-ha, as many small businesses make them be. They are just as crucial for small businesses. Perhaps, even more so if you’re just breaking out.

Events provide opportunities to connect with business partners and potential leads and are also a great way to establish brand reputation. But planning an event is nothing like arranging Thanksgiving dinner, even if the total attendees are about the same as your family members. You still need to manage:

• Budgets
• Logistics
• Venue
• Invites

All at once.

Think virtual event planners have it easier? Reports suggest otherwise. After all, virtual event planning entails coordinating schedules across time zones, sending invites, hosting the event, and the most important bit – making it as engaging as a physical one.

Even an event planning whiz would think twice before taking over event planning responsibilities over their regular work. The good news is, you don’t need to. You can outsource event planning to a professional virtual assistant event planner instead.

This blog explains the common problems small businesses face while planning and how an event planning assistant solves them for you.

Common problems while planning an event for a small business

Scheduling

You could find yourself in either of these scheduling situations when handling events.

Situation 1: Say you’ve decided on the event dates, and they’re scheduled to happen in one month. You now must decide how to manage logistics, invitations, and marketing during this timeframe. Additionally, you need to allocate tasks to your team members on top of their regular responsibilities so that neither projects nor the event face any roadblocks.

Situation 2: If you haven’t decided on your event dates on the other hand, you first need to figure out when it is feasible to hold the event. How much time will you need to plan the event? How many employees do you need to help with it? When will your business partners or leads be able to attend the event?

Figuring out all of this can take considerable time off your daily tasks.

Budgeting

As a small business owner, you most likely have a limited budget. This means you must figure out how you will manage the event expenses - venue, catering, marketing, and hospitality. Besides, you will also need to decide how to hire photographers, decorators, and other staff within your budget.

Think you can cut costs by hosting a virtual event instead? Think again. Virtual events need all your attendees to have a stable internet connection. If you’re planning on hosting a larger-scale virtual event to promote your small business, you need to increase your marketing budget for PR and promotions on various platforms. But that’s not all.

Drafting a budget requires you not just consider where you can cut costs. It requires you to carefully consider which areas in your business could do with lesser funding in the short term so that you can divert more funds towards event planning, depending on the scale.

Logistics

To ensure your event is a success, you need to plan everything down to the last detail before D-day. This includes who is attending your event, what they might need, and reaching out to them timely.

Besides, dealing with vendors might require a lot of back-and-forth communication at odd times. Managing all of this on top of everyday tasks can get taxing, even for a generalist entrepreneur like you.

Marketing

Today, the success of an event depends on the effectiveness of the marketing campaign behind it. No wonder in 2022, up to 18.8% of offline marketing budgets were allocated to event marketing, according to reports.

In simple terms, you need to build an effective marketing campaign and run it on all platforms your prospective attendees are on to ensure your event is a success. And both creating a marketing plan and deploying it can take up considerable amounts of time.

An event planning assistant can take up the burden of all these tasks, leaving you with time to manage your existing workload.

Who is an event planning assistant?

An event virtual assistant is a professional event planner offering their services virtually. They take over all event planning responsibilities, from vendor management to event coordination, and reduce the burden of organizing an event.

Most virtual assistant event planners today are equipped with the skill sets required to manage an event and are proficient in using the latest event management software. This ensures that the entire process is streamlined and glitch-free.

To top it all off, you can hire an event planning assistant on a project basis instead of a full-time event planner for a fraction of the cost.

How can an event planning assistant help you plan a successful event?

Managing logistics

An event planning assistant streamlines event logistics. They decide which vendors to choose according to the company's budget constraints, handle vendor communications, make contracts, and negotiate with them. Not just that.

Since an event planning assistant is a trained professional, they manage all of the above tasks systematically. This means they maintain communications records, file bills, and save copies of the contracts.

They go the extra mile to ensure all the logistical activities are streamlined and ensure you aren't scrambling for records to review the expenses later.

Sending out invites

No small business wants the event they plan to be a dull one. Instead, they want it to foster new connections (read investors), rekindle old ones, and bring them more revenue. Now, organic marketing approaches may get you some visitors, but most businesses still rely on the age-old way of sending invites to ensure good attendance.

A virtual event planner ensures your event is a success, no matter its scale, by sending out invites to the right people. This involves narrowing down potential donors, checking the schedules of relevant speakers, and ensuring potential leads are in attendance.

Creating a budget

Drawing up an event budget is crucial to allocate sufficient funds for an important event. But getting it right is infinitely more challenging, not to mention it takes up a lot of time. But an event virtual assistant can do it on your behalf.

These virtual assistants evaluate your past events, research your industry and the key players and speaker backgrounds thoroughly before charting out a rough budget. Once they get buy-in, they choose the appropriate vendors and even account for contingency funds.

With all this taken care of, you can rest assured that you won’t need to extend your budget to plan the perfect event.

Marketing your event on various platforms

Finally, an event planning assistant manages event marketing tasks for your team. This includes creating accounts, scheduling social media posts promoting the event, overseeing the development of the conversion-optimized event website, sending out passes, surveys, and feedback forms, and identifying the target audience for your upcoming events.

With all these activities taken care of, you never have to worry about your event. Instead, you can spend your time on other tasks that need your attention.

Why hire an event planner virtual assistant from Wishup

Get access to top-notch talent

When you choose to hire a virtual assistant from Wishup, you can be assured you only get the top talent. Here's why.

Virtual assistants on our platform are the top 1% of all the applications we get. So, you can put your worries to rest and be assured your hire is skilled, professional, and a good fit for your company.

Avail of a risk-free trial period

At Wishup, we understand that hiring talent from a third-party platform comes with a fair share of risk. For example, if the hire has the skills, they may not be a good fit. Worse yet, since they work remotely, it might be impossible to track them down if they quit abruptly. This is why at Wishup, we give you a 7-day risk-free trial period.

You can subscribe to virtual assistance from us free of cost for seven days. This gives you enough time to evaluate if you want to continue working with our candidate. Think someone isn't the right fit? You can request a replacement, no questions asked.

We handle the paperwork for you

If you've ever subscribed to a virtual assistant service on another platform, you know that hiring doesn't stop with selecting the candidate. Instead, it involves negotiations, contracts, and a large scoop of paperwork. At Wishup, we make onboarding seamless by handling all legal, finance, payments, and agreements for you.

Steps to hire an event planner virtual assistant from Wishup

You can hire a virtual assistant from Wishup in just three simple steps.

1. Schedule a call with customer success.
2. Select a suitable profile based on your budget and your needs.
3. On-board your qualified virtual assistant within 24 hours.

Plan your next event with ease with a virtual assistant!

As a small business with limited hands-on deck, planning an event can be a taxing job. But a virtual assistant can take over these tasks and save you time and effort.

These event planning professionals handle everything from logistics to marketing before the event and even handle reviews and record insights post D-day for you.

Looking to hire a virtual assistant quickly? Email us at [email protected] or schedule a free consultation today.